Ukraine has made impressive progress in restructuring and stabilizing its economy over the past two years, and yet much remains to be done to revive output and establish a market economy. The 16 papers included in this volume, edited by Peter K. Cornelius and Patrick Lenain, were presented at a seminar sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank in July 1996, which brought together government officials, academics, and staffs of international organizations to discuss a comprehensive medium- term s...

The reputation of the financial industry could hardly be worse than it is today in the painful aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. New York Times best-selling economist Robert Shiller is no apologist for the sins of finance--he is probably the only person to have predicted both the stock market bubble of 2000 and the real estate bubble that led up to the subprime mortgage meltdown. But in this important and timely book, Shiller argues that, rather than condemning finance, we n...

This book provides a comprehensive review of recent economic developments in South Africa and the structural and policy challenges facing the authorities. Individual papers examine a range of topics such as unemployment and the labor market, recent trends in the private saving rate, the role of foreign direct investment in the development of South Africa’s economy, the human and economic repercussions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the role of fiscal policy in economic stabilization, inflation dev...

Security concerns, the AIDS epidemic, environmental degradation, and financial contagion are salient features of today's landscape of threats to global stability. A characteristic of these challenges is that they cannot be solved by individual nations acting alone. Enlightened cooperation is needed.This book focuses on actions in the international arena to complement domestic efforts in addressing a set of policy challenges that has become more prominent in the age of globalization...

This volume brings together various analytical studies the IMF staff has undertaken on the Japanese economy, focusing on two areas of particular interest for both longer-term economic performance and recent cyclical developments. The first is Japan's saving behavior, the second is the remarkable swing in asset prices that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This book examines the financial performance of Turkish firms that were privatized by way of IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). The author uses event study methodology to empirically evaluate the financial efficiency of privatized firms. She also compares the equity returns of state firms to the returns of private sector firms that were listed in the same period or in the same sector. The pre-and-post privatization performance is tested using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test involving accountin...

Contents Wallace E. Oates Remembering Richard Musgrave Gordon L. Brady The Chicago Roots of the Virginia School of Political Economy David Duffy Tax Smoothing in the Presence of the Maastricht Constraint Russell S. Sobel - Christopher J. Coyne - Peter T. Leeson The Political Economy of FEMA: Did Reorganization Matter? Guido Pellegrini - Stefania P. S. Rossi - Ornella Tarola How Regional Policies Can Affect Growth: a Macroeconometric Model for the Southern Italian Regions Reviews

Given the large size of aggregate remittance flows (billions of dollars annually), they should be expected to have significant macroeconomic effects on the economies that receive them. This paper directly addresses the two main issues of interest to policymakers with regard to remittances--how to manage their macroeconomic effects, and how to harness their development potential--by reporting the results of the first global study of the comprehensive macroeconomic effects of remittances on ...

This volume examines how Japan should cope with its daunting fiscal challenges. As the Japanese economy finally emerges from a long period of weak growth and falling prices burdened by record-high public debt, fiscal adjustment has taken center stage in the policy agenda and the public debate. Growing demands on the budget from a rapidly aging society have added urgency to the need to rein in public indebtedness and revamp the pension and health care systems. This book combines insights from ...

In 1978, China embarked on a gradual but far-reaching reform of its economic system. This paper focuses on the achievements so far in reforming the financial sector, the legal framework for financial transactions, the payments system, and the monetary policy and foreign exchange system. It also analyzes the tasks ahead to achieve the goals set in these areas for the year 2000.

This book argues that poor countries need additional, cross-border capital channeled to the private sector for employment generation, growth, and poverty reduction. For that, innovative financing mechanisms are necessary. The volume brings together various market-based innovative methods of raising development finance including securitization of future flow receivables, diaspora bonds, and the role of shadow sovereign ratings in facilitating access to international capital markets.

The procyclicality of financial systems has received an increasing amount of attention from policymakers, academics, and international organizations in recent years. This heightened interest stems from a combination of the ongoing globalization of finance, the role of the financial sector in various emerging market crises in the late 1990s, and the potential impact on financial sectors of the upcoming implementation of the Basel II accord. Some degree of financial sector procyclicality is ...