The central banks of small open economies have to procure the proper operation of the payments system for transactions with the rest of the world. They do so facing the constraint of a limited stock of international reserves. To make ends meet, they usually rely on three instruments: the choice of an exchange rate regime, the regulation of the foreign exchange transactions of commercial banks a...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a very important role in enhancing economic development in Laos. However, SMEs in Laos are small and lack competitiveness. The inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade liberalization in Laos bring opportunities and challenges for SMEs in Laos. Moreover, issues of SMEs and assessment of SMEs promotion policy are not well understood for la...

Empirical growth equations are typically explained by (i) the history of the exchange rate regimes, (ii) capital market liberalization regimes, and (iii) actual balance of payments crises. The literature on the effects of policy switches on growth typically ignores the effect of policy on the likelihood of crises, and, in turn, the effect of crises on growth. It ignored a key explanatory variab...

The objective of the paper is to seek how financial growth affects economic growth in Turkey in the flourishing world. The financial market is changed and developed very rapidly in the last decade. Moreover the change of financial market has also been brought some innovations and new policies. So this study examines whether financial development leads to economic growth in Turkey. The main elem...

In light of the recent financial crises in the emerging markets, the coming-into-force of the financial services agreement under the GATS has been considered a success. While the agreement provides for little new liberalization but rather formalizes the status quo, it was feared that governments could even backtrack on previous commitments in the belief that more open markets could increase the...

We show that equity market liberalizations, on average, lead to a 1% increase in annual real economic growth. The effect is robust to alternative definitions of liberalization and does not reflect variation in the world business cycle. The effect also remains intact when an exogenous measure of growth opportunities is included in the regression. We find that capital account liberalization also ...