The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund use the Low-Income Country Debt Sustainability Framework to assess the sustainability of sovereign debt in about 75 low- and middle-income developing...
The World Bank Research Observer is intended for anyone who has a professional interest in development. Observer articles are written to be accessible to nonspecialist readers; contributors examine key...
An orderly sovereign debt restructuring should place the debtor nation’s public debt on a sustainable trajectory while minimizing procrastination and contagion. However, the experiences with the debt crisis...
Following the cessation of hostilities in May 2009, the Government of Sri Lanka has announced a suitably ambitious macroeconomic vision to capitalize on the peace dividend. Its goals include growing at...
Institutional lending in crisis is evaluated from a theoretical point of view. First, the share of senior loans in new loans is irrelevant under a given probability distribution of the country's resources...
This paper takes a hard look at the experience with official intervention in sovereign debt crises, focusing on debt crises of the 1980s, Russia in 1998, Argentina in 2001, and Greece in 2010. Based on...
This paper examines how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on eight real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular...
The accumulated experience of emerging markets over the past two decades has laid bare the tenuous links between external financial integration and faster growth, on the one hand, and the proclivity of...
In 1998, the Russian Federation experienced one of the most severe emerging market crises of the 1997-2001 periods. It occurred less than six months after the attainment of single-digit inflation, which...
Russia had more-or-less completed the privatization of its manufacturing and natural resource sectors by the end of 1997. And in February 1998, the annual inflation rate at last dipped into the single...
Kenya has long had a reputation of being politically risky, manifested in corruption, uncertainty about policies, and the importance of political connections in doing business. Kenya began its economic...
Over the past 25 years, India's economy grew at an average real rate of close to 6 percent, with growth rates in recent years accelerating to 9 percent. Yet by 2005-06, the general government debt-to-GDP...
Over the past 25 years, significant levels of public debt and external finance are more likely to have enhanced macroeconomic vulnerability than economic growth in developing countries. This applies not...
The study analyzes the complex, inter-linked non-payments system in Russia, to include its origins, evolution, and factors contributing to its development. To the contrary, it identifies a minimum set...
Non-payments cycle in Russia suffocates economic growth - proposal of World Bank Economists; by Brian Pinto, Vladimir Drebentsov, and Alexander Morozov. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development...
World Bank efforts in Bosnia--conflict-solving through reconstruction (Michel Noel and Richard Hirschler). Sarajevo--a close-up: impressions from a tormented city ( Richard Hirschler). Wage convergence...
Long stifled by government controls, emerging market (EM) corporate finance is changing dramatically as recent liberalization is revitalizing stagnant domestic capital markets and permitting increased...
Russia's health reform: a complicated operation. The St. Petersburg fix. Brian Pinto explains why Polish state firms are restructuring - reply to Martin Schrenk. Central European access to EC markets:...
Poland is regarded as a front runner in the recent wave of economic reforms sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. The Economic Transformation Program (ETP) was launched with the now legendary big bang on...
External debt, inflation, and the public sector: toward fiscal policy for sustainable growth. Black market premia, exchange rate unification, and inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Indexation and inflationary...