How open are the capital accounts in Korea and Taiwan? Has there been a trend towards more financial openness during the 1980s? This paper aims at answering both questions by estimating a model of interest determination first outlined by Edwards and Khan, in an extension suggested by Haque and...

The 1990s have witnessed pronounced boom-bust cycles in emerging-markets lending, culminating in the Asian financial and currency crisis of 1997-98. By examining the links between sovereign credit ratings and dollar bond yield spreads over 1989-97, this paper aims at broad empirical content for...

Suppose a DAC donor earmarks $ 1 billion of taxpayers’ money for official development assistance (ODA). The donor may use two instruments as an outright grant or in combination with a market loan to produce a concessional loan of $ 2 billion with a percentage grant element of 50 per cent. Many...

Three novel macroeconomic policy challenges are discussed in this paper: the macroeconomic implications of China’s emergence; the implications of intensifying financial integration; and the interaction of Asia’s foreign exchange regime with monetary policy in the OECD area. First, China may...

The variety of channels through which devaluation of the exchange rate impacts on real tax receipts, calls for empirical clarification. This paper should be seen as a first attempt towards empirical evidence. It establishes the causal relationships between the real exchange rate and real tax...

This paper provides statistically significant international evidence on the interaction between funded pensions and aggregate savings, after controlling for country-specific effects and for other saving determinants that have typically been identified in earlier cross-country studies. Using...

The present level of ODA falls short of the amount needed to finance the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The figure of additional $50 billion per year, roughly the present total of ODA spent by DAC donors, is often quoted (e.g. by the Zedillo Report); it results from the sum of the fight...

The so-called “accession economies” preparing to enter the European Union are experiencing increased inward capital flows based upon positive interest spreads and expectations of currency appreciation. While the authorities of these countries have tried to manage these flows and to prevent...

How and to what extent can a high degree of global financial integration help the fast-ageing OECD benefit from the delayed ageing process in the non-OECD area? The question is being raised with increasing urgency as it is slowly understood that even fully funded pension schemes will not escape...

Investment in most heavily indebted countries has been weak since 1982. The widely accepted debt overhang proposition interprets the investment drop as a moral hazard problem: a heavy debt burden raises the incentive to consume, because the marginal benefit of investment would go to the...