You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The global development community is teeming with different ideas and interventions to improve the lives of the world's poorest people. Whether these succeed in having a transformative impact depends not just on their individual brilliance but on whether they can be brought to a scale where they reach millions of poor people. Getting to Scale explores what it takes to expand the reach of development solutions beyond an individual village or pilot program so they serve poor people everywhere. Each chapter documents one or more contemporary case studies, which together provide a body of evidence on how scale can be pursued. The book suggests that the challenge of scaling up can be divided into ...
The paper tests the effectiveness of financial soundness indicators (FSIs) as harbingers of banking crises, using multivariate logit models to see whether FSIs, broad macroeconomic indicators, and institutional indicators can indeed predict crisis occurrences. The analysis draws upon a data set of homogeneous indicators comparable across countries over the period 2005 to 2012, leveraging the IMF’s FSI database. Results indicate significant correlation between some FSIs and the occurrence of systemic banking crises, and suggest that some indicators are precursors to the occurrence of banking crises.
These are tumultuous times for the banking industry in Europe. The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 has rarely been out of the headlines since. Yet this has not been solely a period of crisis management. It has also been a time of positive change and reform, involving self-examination by the banks; tough scrutiny by governments, regulators and the public; and a general determination to ensure that this crisis never happens again. This book seeks to explain what has been going on. Commissioned by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, it is a collection of essays by some of the leading authorities in the field - senior regulators, specialists on pay and management, corporate CEOs and political and academic experts - about the reshaping of Europe's banking sector. What has changed, and what still has to change? What has gone wrong, and how is it being put right? What are the challenges ahead for this vital industry and those who oversee it? The debate continues, and this volume is an essential contribution.
The World Development Report 2014 examines how improving risk management can lead to larger gains in development and poverty reduction. It argues that improving risk management is crucial to reduce the negative impacts of shocks and hazards, but also to enable people to pursue new opportunities for growth and prosperity.
This paper re-examines the stock-flow discrepancies of government debt and deficits and correlation with fiscal transparency. Applying the fully integrated relationship between financial stocks and flows allows for a more refined analysis of the deterministic components that make up the ‘stock-flow’ residual. Using partial measures of these stock-flow residuals, several empirical studies have found them to be significantly correlated with fiscaltransparency, inflation, fiscal rules, and banking crisis. Using fully integrated public finance data from the IMF Government Finance Statistics Yearbook for a sample of 22 countries, the findings in this paper suggest that stock-flow residuals have a significantly smaller magnitude than previously assumed and are, in fact, not correlated with fiscal transparency. A stronger determinant of fiscal transparency scores appears to be the actual reporting of fiscal data covering general government, especially a full financial balance sheet.
This book explores the way in which banks were regulated in the UK in the period from 1946 until 1971. It focuses upon a group of 11 banks known as the London clearing banks. These banks included the ‘Big Five’ – Barclays, Lloyds, Midland, National Provincial and Westminster – and were the equivalent to today’s retail banks. The time period in question is an intriguing one in the history of banking and bank regulation in that the banking system was very stable, but the regulatory framework was less dependent upon codified forms of regulation than it is today. Having explored the nature of clearing bank regulation, Arch goes on to consider the rationale behind it, as well as its consequences. She concludes by reflecting upon the nature of bank regulation since the global financial crisis. This title is essential reading for academics with an interest in banking history and bank regulation, for practicing bank regulators and for regulatory policymakers.
This Selected Issues paper examines labor productivity in Israel. Israel’s GDP per capita is low relative to the United States despite high labor input, as labor productivity is low. Catch-up of labor productivity to the United States stopped in the 1980s and relative labor productivity has since declined. Low labor productivity is the result of a low capital-to-labor ratio—kept low by high employment growth—and low total factor productivity growth. The latter may reflect lack of competition and product market restrictions, which are among the highest in advanced economies. Boosting competition, lowering product-market restrictions, and improving the quality of education and infrastructure would help boost productivity.
This Selected Issues paper presents a comparison on public expenditure of Austria and other countries. In the past decade, Austria’s government expenditure growth has been very steady, thus avoiding the boom–bust pattern of some other European countries. However, expenditure levels are relatively high, and the difference with Germany has been widening. Compared with other countries, spending is particularly high for pensions, capital transfers and subsidies, including in the transport sector. According to economic classification, the composition of expenditure in the main categories has been more stable. Social benefits and transfers in kind, increasing by 0.7 percentage points between 2002 and 2012, have remained the highest component by far. Nevertheless, expenditure levels in Austria are relatively high, and the difference with Germany has been widening. A cross-country analysis of public spending by different type of categories shows several areas where spending stands out.
This paper leverages the IMF’s Financial Access Survey (FAS) database to construct a new composite index of financial inclusion. The topic of financial inclusion has gathered significant attention in recent years. Various initiatives have been undertaken by central banks both in advanced and developing countries to promote financial inclusion. The issue has also attracted increasing interest from the international community with the G-20, IMF, and World Bank Group assuming an active role in developing and collecting financial inclusion data and promoting best practices to improve financial inclusion. There is general recognition among policy makers that financial inclusion plays a significant role in sustaining employment, economic growth, and financial stability. Nonetheless, the issue of its robust measurement is still outstanding. The new composite index uses factor analysis to derive a weighting methodology whose absence has been the most persistent of the criticisms of previous indices. Countries are then ranked based on the new composite index, providing an additional analytical tool which could be used for surveillance and policy purposes on a regular basis.