The authors investigate the origins of the East Asian crisis and its contagion, examine the channels of contagion, and discuss policy recommendationsThey make detailed recommendations in the context of nine general lessons learned from the East Asian crisis. 1) Preventing crises and contagion:...

The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking...

This paper analyzes the historical evolution of the international monetary system in the context of the rising role of developing countries in the world economy and the emerging multi-polar growth setting. It evaluates the stability of the current "non-system" and how the global economic context...

The accumulated experience of emerging markets over the past two decades has laid bare the tenuous links between external financial integration and faster growth, on the one hand, and the proclivity of such integration to fuel costly crises on the other. These crises have not gone without...

In December 1999, the Boards of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund approved a new approach to their relations with low-income countries. The approach was centered around the development and implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS), which are intended to be...

Subsidies to residential utility customers are popular among policymakers, utility managers, and utility customers alike, but they are nonetheless the subject of much controversy. Utility subsidies are seen as a way to help make utility service affordable for poor households and as an...

The present study uses the GIDD, a CGE-microsimulation model for Global Income Distribution Dynamics, to understand the ex-ante dynamics of global income distribution. Three main robust results emerge. First, under a set of realistic assumptions, there will be a reduction in global income...

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what quot;povertyquot; means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust...

This paper analyzes the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's...

Financial liberalization was expected to make interest rates, and asset prices more volatile, with distributional consequences, such as reduced, or relocated rents, and increased competition in financial services. The author examines available data on money market, and bank interest rates for...