Financial Resilience of Integrating Emerging Economies

Supported by the Rockefeller Research and Impact Fund

This project analyses the financial resilience of emerging economies in response to post-crisis policy responses by investigating cross-border financial and regulatory interconnections between advanced and emerging economies. Based on the evidence we find, we assess financial resilience of key emerging economies and propose measures to strengthen resilience.

The past decade has seen profound shifts in the global environment in which emerging economies operate. Unconventional monetary policies in advanced economies have given rise to capital flows of previously unseen magnitude and volatility. Post-crisis overhauls of financial regulations have focused on problems in advanced country financial systems, but they have also had significant repercussions for less developed financial systems. Meanwhile, as emerging economies have grown larger and their financial systems more integrated into the global economy, feedback loops from them have become material. 

To assess financial resilience in emerging economies, the project focuses on three interrelated issues in the interface of economics and political science: (1) advanced country monetary policy constraints on emerging economies; (2) economic integration with distorted and underdeveloped financial systems; (3) the impact of these issues on the role of central banks in emerging economies, also taking into account ongoing changes in the role of central banks in advanced economies.

Period: 24 months

Investigators

Mario-Blejer

Dr Mario I Blejer

Dr Mario Blejer is a Visiting Professor in the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics.He has held the positions of Governor of the Central bank of Argentina, Senior Adviser to the Governor of the Bank of England and Director of its Centre for Central Banking Studies, and held senior positions at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Currently he is Deputy Chairman of Banco Hipotecario, one of Argentina’s largest commercial banks and Board Director, IRSA, Argentina’s largest real estate company. Mario held the Walter Rathenau Chair in European Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was Director of the Helmut Kohl Institute.

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Dimitri G Demekas

Dimitri is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the LSE, an independent consultant for various organizations, and a Special Adviser on financial stability issues at the Bank of England. After a 30-year career at the International Monetary Fund, he left in 2017 as Assistant Director of the Monetary & Capital Markets Department. During his Fund career, he revamped the IMF’s financial surveillance toolkit, managed globally the IMF’s Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP), and directed the development of macroprudential stress testing frameworks. He has also worked as an Adviser to the EU Presidency and represented the IMF in a number of international fora and FSB working groups. Prior to that, Dimitri led IMF operations in several countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He has a B.A. from the University of Athens, Greece, a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, and an extensive record of publications in economics and finance.

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Kilian Huber

Kilian is the Saieh Family Fellow in Macroeconomics at the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago. In July 2019, he will join the Booth School of Business as Assistant Professor. He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.Kilian’s research lies at the intersection of finance and macroeconomics. He uses data on banks, firms, and households to study how the financial sector affects the real economy. His research has been published in the American Economic Review.

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Douglas Laxton

Douglas Laxton is Division Chief of the Economic Modeling Division (EMD) in the IMF's Research Department. He joined the Research Department in 1993 and has held numerous positions, including Advisor to the IMF's Economic Counsellor. The EMD is responsible for developing modern macro models to support the IMF's surveillance activities. Mr. Laxton has worked with many central banks over the years, developing forecasting and policy analysis systems to support inflation-forecast targeting frameworks. He has published many papers on a large range of topics, and builds multi-country models, and models of the oil market, to support the IMF’s surveillance activities. More recently, he has been working on models with strong macro-financial linkages designed to support macro prudential policies. Prior to joining the IMF, Mr. Laxton held numerous positions in the Research Department at the Bank of Canada (1981–1993) and was responsible for developing their modeling framework to support inflation targeting. He completed graduate work in economics in 1981 at the University of Western Ontario. For more details see www.douglaslaxton.org.

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Ousmène Jacques Mandeng

Ousmène is Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs and a Senior Advisor with Accenture’s Global Blockchain Technology Practice with a focus on digital currencies. He writes a blog occasionally on international monetary affairs at www.ousmenemandeng.com and specialises on monetary innovation and the international monetary system.

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Piroska Nagy Mohacsi

Piroska Nagy Mohacsi

Piroska is Programme Director in the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics (LSE) since September 2015.  

She is responsible for various global policy initiatives and for setting up the Institute’s Eurasia centre and INet hub. Previously she was Director at the Office of the Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), overseeing the EBRD’s strategic directions in Emerging Europe, Central Asia and North Africa as well as key policy initiatives such as local capital market development, food security, health and climate change. She was also responsible for the EBRD’s economic forecast exercise and co-led the Vienna Initiative, a public-private crisis management and coordination platform in emerging Europe, and headed its Secretariat.

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Vito Tanzi

Vito Tanzi received degrees in economics from Harvard University, (MA, 1963, and PhD, 1967), and from George Washington University (BA and MA, 1961).

In 1967-76 he was Professor of Economics and Department Chair (1970-73) at the American University in Washington. In 1974 he took leave from his university position and joined the International Monetary Fund and in 1981 he was promoted Director of the Fund’s Fiscal Affairs Department, a position that he held until the end of 2000, directed the IMF work in the fiscal area and advising governments on fiscal reforms.

In 2001-2003 he served at ministerial level as Undersecretary for Economy and Finance of Italy. In 2003-6 he was a vising scholar at the Inter-American Development Bank. Since 2006 he has been an independent scholar conducting research and writing.

From 1990 to 1994 he was the President of the International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF) of which he is now Honorary President. He has been awarded honorary degrees from the universities of: Torino and Bari, in Italy; Cordoba, in Argentina; Liege, in Belgium; and Lisbon, in Portugal. He has received various important prizes and has been a visiting professor at various universities. He is an external member of the Lisbon Academy of Science. In recent years he has been a consultant to the UN, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, The World Bank, among others.

Dr Tanzi has published extensively and the author of many books. His recent has focused on the economic role of the state in market economies, on which he has published several books; the most is The Termites of the State: How Complexity Leads to Inequality (2018) was included by the Financial Times among the 12 most important economics books of 2018; he also published The Ecology of Taxation in the same year, as well as the books Government versus Markets (2011).

Outputs

Kilian Huber (October 2017): Are Bigger Banks Better? Firm-Level Evidence from Germany

Vito Tanzi (Janaury 2019): Fiscal Resilience - Termites of the State: The Elusice Search for Harmony Between State and Market

Ousmène Jacques Mandeng (January 2019): Basic principles for regulating crypto-assets

Video book on Financial Resilience and Systemic Risk with recordings of short discussions with lead academic and policy experts on three main dimensions of financial resilience: post-crisis regulatory reform, global financial system resilience and central banking and institutional resilience. The video-book draws on a conference that was co-organised by the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Institute of Global Affairs, Financial Markets Group Research Centre and the Systemic Risk Centre and was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in January 2019.

Mario I Blejer and Paul Wachtel (January 2019): A fresh look at central bank independence: more myth than reality

Dimitri G Demekas (April 2019): Building an Effective Financial Stability Policy Framework: Lessons from the Post-Crisis Decade

Ousmène Jacques Mandeng (June 2019): Digital currencies: New technologies and old monetary ideas

Douglas Laxton, Asya Kostanyan, Akaki Liqokeli, Gevorg Minasyan, Armen Nurbekyan and Tamta Sopromadze (December 2019): Mind the Gaps! Financial-Cycle Output Gaps and Monetary-Policy-Relevant Output Gaps

Mario I Blejer and Paul Wachtel (January 2020): A fresh look at central bank independence