You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Balance sheet recessions have been a drag on activity after the Global Financial Crisis, underscoring the important role of balance sheet adjustment for resuming sustained growth. In this paper we examine private sector deleveraging experiences across 36 advanced and emerging economies countries since 1960. We consider the common features and divergent experiences of deleveraging episodes across countries, and analyze empirically the impact of different aspects of deleveraging during the bust phase of leverage cycles on subsequent medium-term growth. The results suggest that larger and quicker unwinding of non-financial sector debt overhangs is associated with sizable medium-term output gains, and that policies should focus on facilitating up-front balance sheet adjustment.
This paper studies the determinants of shifts in debt composition among EM non-financial corporates. We show that institutions and macro fundamentals create an enabling environment for bond market development. During the recent boom episode, however, global cyclical factors accounted for most of the variation of bond shares in total corporate debt. The sensitivity to global factors appears to vary with relative bond market size—which we interpret to be associated with liquidity and easy entry and exit—rather than local fundamentals. Foreign bank linkages help explain why bond markets increasingly substituted for banks in channeling liquidity to EMs. Our results highlight the risk of capital flow reversal in EMs that benefited from the upturn in the global financial cycle mostly due to their liquid markets rather than strong fundamentals.
This note serves as a reference for balance sheet analysis, which should be read in conjunction with the IMF board paper on Balance Sheet Analysis in Fund Surveillance. It provides a: compendium of good examples of balance sheet analysis from both bilateral and multilateral surveillance, covering a variety of topics; full listing of available balance sheet related macro datasets, including their relevance for surveillance, remaining limitations, and remedial measures being undertaken; summary of data availability for each Fund member; compilation of all the tools for balance sheet analysis developed by the Fund over the last decade; and toolkit featuring some new empirical applications that could help deepen balance sheet analysis in surveillance. These include illustrations of how to construct and use BSA matrices, general equilibrium and reduced form approaches, as well as tools to analyze sectoral vulnerabilities using micro data.
This paper analyzes the economic effects of weak claims enforcement for Cyprus. Claims enforcement in Cyprus is considerably less efficient than in most European Union countries. The banking crisis, which led to a spike in the number of pending litigious civil and commercial cases, could be a factor in the low enforcement efficiency. For Cyprus, piecemeal reform of the enforcement framework may have limited success, and a wholesale review is likely needed. Adding updated components may not fit well with the underlying civil procedure. Instead a comprehensive review, with a focus on limiting case suspensions allowed under interim applications and considering an alternative compensation basis for lawyers should be considered.
In the June 2015 issue, the Research Summaries review "Migration: An Attractive Insurance Option in African Countries" (Ahmat Jidoud) and "Investment in Emerging Markets" (Nicolas E. Magud and Sebastian Sosa). The Q&A looks at "Seven Questions on Islamic Finance” (Inutu Lukonga). The Bulletin also includes its regular listings of recent IMF Working Papers and Staff Discussion Notes, as well as information on the "IMF Economic Review." A new IMF eLibrary discussion site on energy and climate change is highlighted, along with new recommendations from IMF Publications.
The current report finds that, despite an improvement in economic prospects in some key advanced economies, new challenges to global financial stability have arisen. The global financial system is being buffeted by a series of changes, including lower oil prices and, in some cases, diverging growth patterns and monetary policies. Expectations for rising U.S. policy rates sparked a significant appreciation of the U.S. dollar, while long term bond yields in many advanced economies have decreased—and have turned negative for almost a third of euro area sovereign bonds—on disinflation concerns and the prospect of continued monetary accommodation. Emerging markets are caught in these global c...
The global financial crisis has left a large private sector debt overhang and high levels of non- performing loans (NPLs) in several European countries. Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) represent a significant and weak segment of the nonfinancial corporate sector. SMEs face a number of legal, financial, and regulatory challenges to restructuring that differ from those of larger corporates, such as a rigid and costly insolvency regime, a higher fixed cost to loan restructuring, and the lack of alternative sources of financing. Given SMEs’ large presence and close links to the banking system, addressing the SME loan problem in Europe will be critical for strengthening bank and corporate balance sheets and supporting a more robust and sustained recovery.
Assessing country risk is a core component of surveillance at the IMF. It is conducted through a comprehensive architecture, covering both bilateral and multilateral dimensions. This note describes some of the approaches used internally by Fund staff to examine a wide array of systemic risks across advanced, emerging, and low-income economies. It provides a high-level view of the theory and methodologies employed, with an on-line companion guide providing more technical details of implementation. The guide will be updated as Fund staff’s methodologies for assessing country risk continue to evolve with experience and feedback. While the results of these approaches are not published by the IMF for market sensitivity reasons, they inform risk assessments featured in bilateral surveillance as well as in the IMF’s flagship publications on global surveillance.
Many countries around the globe, particularly the systemic advanced economies, face the challenge of closing output gaps and raising potential output growth. Addressing these challenges requires a package of macroeconomic, financial and structural policies that will boost both aggregate demand and aggregate supply, while closing the shortfall between demand and supply. Each element of this package is important and one cannot substitute for the other: easy monetary policy will not raise potential output just as structural reforms will not close the output gap. This report studies the impact on emerging markets and nonsystemic advanced economies from monetary policy actions in systemic advanced economies, with a look also at knock-on effects from the decline in world oil prices.
Addressing the buildup of nonperforming loans (NPLs) in Italy since the global financial crisis will remain a challenge for some time and be important for supporting a sustained, robust economic recovery. The buildup reflects both the prolonged recession as well as structural factors that have held back NPL write-offs by banks. The paper discusses the impediments to NPL resolution in Italy and a strategy for fostering a market for restructuring distressed assets that could support corporate and financial restructuring.