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This paper discusses Colombia’s Request for an Arrangement Under the Flexible Credit Line (FCL) and Cancellation of the Current Arrangement. Colombia has very strong policy frameworks—anchored by a flexible exchange rate, a credible inflation targeting-regime, effective financial sector supervision and regulation, and a structural fiscal rule—that have served as a basis for the economy’s resilience prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. During this time, Colombia has made remarkable efforts to integrate a substantial number of migrants from Venezuela that boosted domestic demand but widened external vulnerabilities. The new arrangement under the FCL is expected to help Colom...
“Regional cooperation exists, but looks different in the global South than in the European Union,” claim the contributors to South American Policy Regionalism, which offers novel theory, methods, and Latin American case studies of joint governance efforts in nine international policy arenas, ranging from illegal drugs to artificial intelligence. Contrasting three major schools of thought in international relations (highlighting power, institutions, and ideas), this book introduces the idea of international policy regionalism as a framework for informed debate about international policy-sector interactions in a regional space. Beginning with a conceptual approach applicable to any world r...
This study takes stock of progress made so far in the financial sectors of sub-saharan African countries. It recommends further reforms and specific measures in the areas of supervision, development of monetary operations and financial markets, external sector liberalization, central bank autonomy and accountability, payments system, and central bank accounting and auditing.
The proximity of the European Union, the prospect of membership, and actual entry by the New Member States (NMS) increased economic and financial integration in the region, leading to fast economic growth based on sizeable capital inflows. EU membership helped in developing sound macroeconomic and financial stability frameworks in the NMS. However, these frameworks remain work in progress and as such could not safeguard against private sector exuberance or risky policies, especially in the face of an unprecedented global financial crisis. Hence, more prudent policies and further strengthening of policy frameworks, especially with respect to financial stability, seem warranted.
We document that, historically, although stronger growth in the U.S. increases growth in emerging markets, U.S. dollar appreciation (depreciation) cycles—which are highly persistent—mitigate (amplify) the impact on real GDP growth in emerging markets. We argue that the main transmission channel of the latter is through an income effect: as the dollar appreciates, commodity prices fall; weaker commodity prices depress domestic demand via lower real income; real GDP in emerging markets decelerates; and vice versa. These effects hold despite any potential expenditure-switching effect resulting from the relative (to the U.S. dollar) currency depreciation of emerging market economies. We also show the negative effect on emerging markets’ growth of U.S. interest rates beyond the effects of the U.S. real exchange rate and real GDP growth. Therefore, at the time of writing, emerging markets’ growth is expected to remain subdued reflecting, intera alia, the expected persistence of the strong dollar and the anticipated increased in the U.S. interest rates.
The latest in a series of papers published by the International Monetary Fund on economies in transition examines the experience of disinflation in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Russia, and other countries of the former Soviet Union between 1993 and 1997. The paper reviews the economic policies underlying the dramatic drop in inflation during those years as well as other variables that facilitated the disinflation and notes that the adjustment of fiscal fundamentals as the driving force behind the disinflation, while nominal anchoring arrangements played a less prominent role. This was contrary to developments in countries, for example, in Latin America, that had experienced high inflation for a long period of time.
Paraguay faces a trade-off between building fiscal credibility and amending the existing fiscal rule to accommodate infrastructure investment and provide space for countercyclical policies. In this paper, we discuss several alternative fiscal rules for Paraguay and present simulations of debt trajectories in each case, assuming a baseline and three deterministic shock scenarios. We provide a supplementary Excel file to replicate debt simulations under different fiscal rules. The results suggest that potential modifications to make the fiscal rules more flexible in Paraguay should be accompanied by a number of safeguards that enhance credibility of the fiscal anchor and preserve sustainability.
From Fragmentation to Financial Integration in Europe is a comprehensive study of the European Union financial system. It provides an overview of the issues central to securing a safer financial system for the European Union and looks at the responses to the global financial crisis, both at the macro level—the pendulum of financial integration and fragmentation—and at the micro level—the institutional reforms that are taking place to address the crisis. The emerging financial sector management infrastructure, including the proposed Single Supervisory Mechanism and other elements of a banking union for the euro area, are also discussed in detail.
This study quantifies the importance of a Global Financial Cycle (GFCy) for capital flows. We use capital flow data dis-aggregated by direction and type between 1990Q1 and 2015Q5 for 85 countries, and conventional techniques, models and metrics. Since the GFCy is an unobservable concept, we use two methods to represent it: directly observable variables in center economies often linked to it, such as the VIX; and indirect manifestations, proxied by common dynamic factors extracted from actual capital flows. Our evidence seems mostly inconsistent with a significant and conspicuous GFCy; both methods combined rarely explain more than a quarter of the variation in capital flows. Succinctly, most variation in capital flows does not seem to be the result of common shocks nor stem from observables in a central country like the United States.
Economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) improved substantially over the past twenty years. The past decade was particularly good—for the first time EMDEs spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns thanadvanced economies. In this paper we document the history of EMDEs’ resilience over the past sixty years, and investigate what factors have been associated with it. We find that their improved performance in recent years is accounted for by both good policies and a lowerincidence of external and domestic shocks—better policies account for about three-fifths of their improved resilience, while less frequent shocks account for the remainder.