Fiscal discipline is essential to improve and sustain economic performance, maintain macroeconomic stability, and reduce vulnerabilities. Discipline is especially important if countries, industrial as well as developing, are to successfully meet the challenges, and reap the benefits, of economic...

Increasing emphasis has been placed on the need for an effective lender of last resort for sovereign states and on procedures for sovereign debt restructuring to help cope with global financial crises. Where private creditors use short-term debt to check sovereign debtor’s moral hazard, there...

Since the mid-1980s, there has been a very substantial increase in stock market activity in many developing countries. This paper first examines the main characteristics of the emerging stock markets, and illustrates the evolution of equity prices in these markets over the last decade. It then...