Economic indicators such as GDP, current account deficit, foreign direct investment, and total credit, have played an important role in adjusting a country's economy. In order to obtain desirable results, policy makers should understand how much valuable these economic tools can be while they are making their decisions. This book intends to help create an understanding of how these indicators can be managed and made use of in adjusting a country's economy policies not only for policy makers but also for academics and those dealing with the market. With this respect, the relationship among economic indicators such as current account deficit, GDP, foreign direct investment, and total credits for G7 countries for the period between 1990-2011 was studied using panel co-integration tests and causality tests developed by leading academics all around the world.

During the 1990s, the governments of South Asian countries acted as ‘facilitators’ to attract FDI. As a result, the inflow of FDI increased. However, to become an attractive FDI destination as China, Singapore, or Brazil, South Asia has to improve the local conditions of doing business. This book, based on research that blends theory, empirical evidence, and policy, asks and attempts to answer a few core questions relevant to FDI policy in South Asian countries: Which major reforms have succeeded? What are the factors that influence FDI inflows? What has been the impact of FDI on macroeconomic performance? Which policy priorities/reforms needed to boost FDI are pending? These questions and answers should interest policy makers, academics, and all those interested in FDI in the South Asian region and in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Economists and policymakers are still trying to understand the lessons recent financial crises in Asia and other emerging market countries hold for the future of the global financial system. In this timely and important volume, distinguished academics, officials in multilateral organizations, and public and private sector economists explore the causes of and effective policy responses to international currency crises. Topics covered include exchange rate regimes, contagion (transmission of currency crises across countries), the current account of the balance of payments, the role of private sector investors and of speculators, the reaction of the official sector (including the multilaterals), capital controls, bank supervision and weaknesses, and the roles of cronyism, corruption, and large players (including hedge funds). Ably balancing detailed case studies, cross-country comparisons, and theoretical concerns, this book will make a major contribution to ongoing efforts to understand and prevent international currency crises.

This volume discusses the impact of Financial Economics, Growth Dynamics, and the Finance & Banking sector in the economies of countries. The contributors analyse and discuss the effects of the recent financial crises on the economic growth and performance in various countries. The volume covers aspects like foreign borrowing, impact on productivity and debt crises that are strongly affected by the financial volatility of recent years and includes examples from Europe and Asia. In addition, the authors give particular attention to the private sector of Finance and Banking, which is deeply interwoven with the financial performance of a country’s economy. Examples such as bank profitability and troubled loans are covered and the volume also discusses the economic impact of banks such as the Ottoman Bank in a national economy. The book also explores the importance of financial stability, intellectual capital and bank performance for a stable economic environment.

The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing between the positive empirical analysis and the normative assessment of current accounts and exchange rates, and highlights the roles of policies and policy distortions. This paper provides a comprehensive description and discussion of the 2013 version (“2.0”) of the EBA methodology, including areas for its further development.

The Financial Action Task Force’s gray list publicly identifies countries with strategic deficiencies in their AML/CFT regimes (i.e., in their policies to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism). How much gray-listing affects a country’s capital flows is of interest to policy makers, investors, and the Fund. This paper estimates the magnitude of the effect using an inferential machine learning technique. It finds that gray-listing results in a large and statistically significant reduction in capital inflows.