This Selected Issues paper on the Republic of Poland constructs a financial conditions index for Poland to explore the link between financial conditions and real economic activity. Measures to contain the fiscal deficit in the aftermath of the global financial crisis led to a reduction in the...

The recent currency and financial turmoil in East Asia have led to the evaluation of current financial and macroeconomic policies. The Philippines, which has been the worst hit in the 1980 economic crisis has indicated greater resilience in the 1990 financial crisis. Experts have attributed this...

There is a good reason to justify the support for small and microenterprise development. At this point, what is more important is the formulation of research agenda that will facilitate the introduction of new insights into the sector’s development. This paper provides a background to the...

Despite the pawnshop’s recently gained popularity as an alternative source of credit, very little study has been accorded to it. To date, there is hardly any thorough study about it. This paper is an attempt to bridge that gap. It analyzes the role of pawnshops in the financial system with...

How are interest rates determined in an open economy after financial liberalization has taken place? This is the main question that this paper attempts to answer. Utilizing a model adopted from Edwards and Khan, the author explains how interest rates are determined by both domestic monetary...

This paper constructs a financial conditions index for Poland to explore the link between financial conditions and real economic activity. The index in constructed by applying two complementary approaches—factor analysis and vector auto-regression approach. We evaluate the index’s...

The degree of an economy’s monetization, which has an important implication on economic growth, can be affected by the conduct of monetary policy, financial sector reform, and episodes of financial crises. The paper finds that monetization--measured by the ratio of broad money to nominal...

What attracts conventional investors to Islamic financial instruments? We answer this question by comparing Malaysian Islamic and conventional security prices and their response to macrofinancial factors. Our analysis suggests that Islamic and conventional bond and equity prices are driven by...