The resumption of capital flows to emerging market economies since mid 2009 has posed two sets of interrelated challenges for policymakers: (i) to prevent capital flows from exacerbating overheating pressures and consequent inflation, and (ii) to minimize the risk that prolonged periods of easy...

This paper explores how much of the movements in the sovereign spreads of Asian economies over the course of the global financial crisis has reflected shifts in (i) global risk aversion; (ii) country-specific risks, directly from worsening fundamentals, and indirectly from spillovers originating...

This paper explores optimal monetary and macroprudential policy rules in an open-economy with significant exposure to external borrowing in the face of a sudden reversal of capital inflows. We consider optimal Taylor-type interest rate rules, where the policy rate is set as a function of...

The recent global financial crisis was the first in recent history that was triggered by problems in the financial system of the mature economies. Existing work on financial crisis in emerging market countries, however, almost exclusively focus on the role of financial frictions in the domestic...

The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing...

This paper investigates the mechanisms through which environmental taxes on fossil fuel usage can affect the main macroeconomic variables in the short-run. We concentrate on a particular mechanism: speculative storage. The existence of forward-looking speculators in the model improves the...

We develop a micro-founded general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents to identify pertinent constraints to financial inclusion. We evaluate quantitatively the policy impacts of relaxing each of these constraints separately, and in combination, on GDP and inequality. We focus on three...