A crisis provides an opportunity to examine how an economy works under pathological conditions. What are the lessons? Markets work well most of the time. That said, the global financial crisis has weakened faith in the market’s self-equilibrating qualities. Fiscal policy works well to offset...

Rebalancing growth toward domestic demand has emerged as a key postcrisis challenge for sustaining developing Asia’s rapid growth in the medium and long term. The central objective of this paper is to explore the role of fiscal policy in the region’s rebalancing process. What matters most...

Fiscal stimulus programs have contributed substantially to developing Asia’s faster and stronger than expected recovery from the global financial crisis. This may lead to political pressures for greater use of countercyclical fiscal policy in the postcrisis period. However, the countercyclical...