Blog
Making Finance the Servant not the MasterTony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
29 November 2012 Carl-Gustav Lindén In November 2012 UNU-WIDER had the pleasure of hosting a public event with Dr Kaushik Basu, the newly appointed...
The global economic crisis beginning in 2008 has come at an inopportune time for Africa. Economic growth had recovered, poverty had declined, and human development had improved. Then the crisis hit. Growth then fell by 60 per cent. The growth decline...
One year into the global economic crisis, it has become clear that the paradigm for international development has changed irrevocably. With leadership, moral authority and the capacity of the West in international development diminishing, developing...
Africa is the developing region most at risk from the global economic crisis. Its recent strong growth has been interrupted. Already home to the largest number of low-income countries in the world, the region is now likely to experience higher...
Tony Addison and Finn Tarp More than 200 researchers and policymakers came together in Helsinki in mid-May to celebrate UNU-WIDER's 25th anniversary...
Economic growth in Vietnam was resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. Impacts on employment and poverty are also disputed. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose growth and...
This paper studies individual-level labour market transitions and their determinants in South Africa during the zenith and aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis using 2008 to 2010-2011 panel data from the National Income Dynamics...
Marco V. Sánchez and Rob Vos Substantial slowdown in progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be expected as a consequence of...
By Imed Drine Whilst having a global impact, the current financial and economic crisis is clearly affecting certain regions more severely than others...
Wim Naudé Following the US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008, the world is now staggering from financial to economic crisis as many high-income...
Augustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
This study examines the role of institutions and their change related to the rapid economic development and the 1997 Korean financial crisis. In Korea, the government built a state-led financial system through the 1960s and 1970s and a specific...
Beginning with an empirical analysis of banking crises using a logit econometric model covering a sample of developed and developing countries between 1980-97, the paper suggests that crises are more likely in years of low growth and high real...
Recent financial crises, whose effects have been particularly severe in developing countries, have led to a wide-ranging debate on international financial reform. This debate has had to confront the implications of the huge growth of international...
This paper outlines the impact of the global economic crisis on Africa. Recovery requires coordinated and consistent efforts to assist individual countries in mitigating (reducing) the risk, coping with the impact, and reducing risk over the longer...
The abundance of private capital flows confronts many emerging-market authorities with a transfer problem. They must decide whether to accept or resist the net capital inflow, or how much to accept and how much to resist. This paper aims at assisting...
This paper analyses in depth the causes of the Mexican peso crisis, so as to learn relevant lessons for similar crisis occurring in other developing or transitional economies. The study follows a relatively chronological order, examining first the...
We analyse the prospects for greater monetary integration in Africa, in the wake of EMU. We argue that the structural characteristics of African economies are quite different to the EMU members but that much can be gained from monetary cooperation...
This article argues that developing countries face inherent obstacles in setting up efficient financial regulation, and building up a sound banking sector: the presence of multiple tasks and multiple principals, poor institutions, lack of economies...
by Tony Addison and Giovanni Andrea Cornia Asia's crisis has halted social progress The human development indicators of East Asia and South-East Asia...
by Noeleen Heyzer and Martin KhorThe debate on the Asian crisis continues. There are two sets of reasons given to explain why the Asian Miracles...
I recently returned from a week at the University of Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, speaking at a conference honouring Nobel laureate Desmond...
Building on a Lewis-type model of structural change and entrepreneurship we show how a global economic crisis consisting of a financial and a trade shock can undermine structural change in developing countries via the start-up and innovation...
The global financial crisis has emphasised the fundamental role of social protection institutions in developing countries. There is also growing evidence that countries with programmes focused on children have a greater chance of minimising the...
Poor rural and urban households in developing countries face substantial risks, which they handle with risk-management and risk-coping strategies, including self-insurance through savings and informal insurance mechanisms. Despite these mechanisms...
This collection analyses the new trends in capital flows to emerging markets since the Asian crisis, their determinants and policy implications. It explains why such flows have declined so dramatically in recent years, emphasising both structural and...
The currency crises that engulfed East Asian economies in 1997 and Mexico in 1994 - and their high development costs - raise a serious concern about the net benefits for developing countries of large flows of potentially reversible short-term...
What started in the summer of 1997 as a regional economic and financial crisis in East and Southeast Asia had developed into a global financial crisis within the span of a year. This crisis followed the crisis in the European Monetary System in 1992...
We provide a novel empirical analysis of the South Korean credit market that reveals large volumes of excess credit since the late 1970s, indicating that a sizeable proportion of total credit was being used to refinance unprofitable projects. Our...
We consider an overlapping generations model with two production factors and two types of agents in the presence of financial intermediation and its application to the Russian default of August 1998. The paper focuses on the analysis of the...
Economic growth in Vietnam has been fairly resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. In addition, the impact of the crises on employment and poverty is in dispute. We develop a dynamic computable general...
The paper deals with changes in the regulation and supervision of the Latin American financial sector in the aftermath of the ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994–95. While it finds that both have improved, regulation and supervision cannot resolve all problems...
This paper has two aims. The first is to provide some explanation for the extraordinary collapse in cross-border bank lending to developing countries which has taken place since 1997. The second is to argue that it might be too simplistic to...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid Policy and the Macroeconomic Management of Aid
Part of Book Governing Globalization
In this overview we try to explain, first, why funds continued to flow towards emerging economies while fundamentals in host countries had been deteriorating before the Asian crisis (rising external deficit, with a significant liquid component...
Up until the recent crisis, the Southeast Asian region had been regarded as one of the most dynamic regions in the global economy. Their industrial structures have undergone a process of adjustment into more capital-intensive and technologically...
This paper examines the impact of globalization on two transitional economies in Asia. Both countries have undergone a radical economic reform process over the past decade, assisted by increases in external trade flows, foreign investment activity...
The increased importance of rating agencies for emerging-market finance has brought their work to the attention of a wider group of observers - and under criticism. This paper evaluates whether the importance of ratings for developing-country finance...
24 September 2014 Andrés Solimano The era of neoliberal capitalism starting by the late 1970s and early 1980s promotes free trade, capital mobility...