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The assessment of external positions and exchange rates is a key mandate of the IMF. This paper presents the updated External Balance Assessment (EBA) framework—a key input in the conduct of multilaterally-consistent external sector assessments of 49 advanced and emerging market economies—following the two rounds of refinements adopted since the framework was introduced in 2012 (as described in Phillips et al., 2013). It also presents new complementary tools for shedding light on the role of structural factors in explaining external imbalances and assessing potential biases in the measurement of external positions. Remaining challenges and areas of future work are also discussed.
The new African oil boomcentered on the oil-rich Atlantic waters of the Gulf of Guinea, from Nigeria to Angolais a moment of great opportunity and great peril for countries beset by wide-scale poverty.
This factbook presents numbers and facts behind the stories of international migration and remittances, drawing on authoritative, publicly available data. It provides a comprehensive picture of emigration, skilled emigration, immigration, and remittance flows for 210 countries and 15 country groups. Some interesting facts: More than 215 million people, or 3 percent of the world population, live outside their countries of birth. Current migration flows, relative to population, are weaker than those of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The volume of South-South migration (migration between developing countries) is larger than migration from the South to high-income OECD countries. In...
In recent decades, the foreign assets and liabilities of advanced economies have grown rapidly relative to GDP, with the increase in gross cross-holdings far exceeding changes in the size of net positions. Moreover, the portfolio equity and FDI categories have grown in importance relative to international debt stocks. This paper describes the broad trends in international financial integration for a sample of industrial countries and seeks to explain the cross-country and time-series variation in the size of international balance sheets. It also examines the behavior of the rates of return on foreign assets and liabilities, relating them to "market" returns.
A new wave of technological innovations, often called “fintech,” is accelerating change in the financial sector. What impact might fintech have on financial services, and how should regulation respond? This paper sets out an economic framework for thinking through the channels by which fintech might provide solutions that respond to consumer needs for trust, security, privacy, and better services, change the competitive landscape, and affect regulation. It combines a broad discussion of trends across financial services with a focus on cross-border payments and especially the impact of distributed ledger technology. Overall, the paper finds that boundaries among different types of service providers are blurring; barriers to entry are changing; and improvements in cross-border payments are likely. It argues that regulatory authorities need to balance carefully efficiency and stability trade-offs in the face of rapid changes, and ensure that trust is maintained in an evolving financial system. It also highlights the importance of international cooperation.
Swing pricing allows a fund manager to transfer to redeeming or subscribing investors the costs associated with their trading activity, thus potentially discouraging large flows. This liquidity management tool, which is already used in major jurisdictions, may also help mitigate systemic risk. Here we develop and apply a methodology to investigate whether swing pricing does in fact help dampen flows out of funds, especially during periods of market stress. Drawing on evidence of first-mover advantage within a group of ‘swinging’ corporate bond funds, we provide policy considerations for enhancing the tool’s effectiveness as a systemic risk mitigant.
The paper provides robust evidence that compliance with Basel Core Principles (BCPs) has a strong positive effect on the Z-score of conventional banks, albeit less pronounced on the Zscore of Islamic banks. Using a sample of banks operating in 19 developing countries, the results appear to be driven by capital ratios, a component of Z-score for the two types of banks. Even though smaller on Islamic banks, individual chapters of BCPs also suggest a positive effect on the stability of conventional banks. The findings support the effective role of BCP standards in improving bank stability, whose important implications led to the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) publication of new recommendations in 2015 to bring BCP standards in line with the Core Principles for Islamic Finance Regulation (CPIFRs) standards. Our findings suggest that because Islamic banks are benchmarked closely to BCPs, the implementation of CPFIRs should also positively affect their stability.