This paper presents the primary institutions and economic policies that have led to Chile’s remarkable record of stability and growth over the past twenty years. The core of this policy stance is the combination of fiscal discipline and an open trade policy regime, together with carefully...

Recent events have shown that sovereigns, just like banks, can be subject to runs, highlighting the importance of the investor base for their liabilities. This paper proposes a methodology for compiling internationally comparable estimates of investor holdings of sovereign debt. Based on this...

This paper examines how exchange rate volatility and Korean banks’ foreign exchange liquidity mismatches interacted with each other during the Global Financial Crisis, and whether the vulnerability stemming from this interaction has been reduced since then. Structural and cyclical changes...

The staff report for the 2011 Article IV Consultation concluded that a vibrant recovery marked Estonia’s first year in the euro area, albeit amid nascent tensions. The economy’s strong rebound has been grounded in a proven track record of prudent macroeconomic policies. Executive...

Romania’s external position continues to improve. Inflation peaked in December 2010, and is now likely to decline. Financial market stress has remained relatively low in recent months. The current account deficit improved from 13½ percent of GDP in 2007 to about 4¼ percent of GDP in...

Today’s record public debt levels in most advanced economies are not only a direct fall-out from the global crisis. Public debt had ratcheted up over many decades before, when it had been used, in most of the G-7 countries, as the ultimate shock absorber—rising in bad times but not...

The permanent income hypothesis implies that frictionless open economies with exhaustible natural resources should save abroad most of their resource windfalls and, therefore, feature current account surpluses. Resource-rich developing countries (RRDCs), on the other hand, face substantial...

Implementation of fiscal consolidation by advanced economies in coming years needs to take into account the short and long-run interactions between economic growth and fiscal policy. Many countries must reduce high public debt to GDP ratios that penalize longterm growth. However, fiscal...

This paper introduces a new dataset on the composition of the investor base for government securities in the G20 advanced economies and the euro area. During the last decades, investors from abroad have increased their presence in government bond markets. The financial crisis broke this trend....

This paper addresses the issue of threshold effects between public debt and economic growth in the Caribbean. The main finding is that there exists a threshold debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of 55–56 percent. Moreover, the debt dynamics begin changing well before this...