This folder includes the replication package for the manuscript titled "The Political Scar of Epidemics". Please refer to the read-me file for details regarding the replication package.

Stablecoins and central bank digital currencies are on the horizon in Asia, and in some cases have already arrived. This paper provides new analysis and a critique of the use case for both forms of digital currency. It provides time-varying estimates of devaluation risk for the leading stablecoin, Tether, using data from the futures market. It describes the formidable obstacles to widespread use of central bank digital currencies in cross-border transactions, the context in which their utility is arguably greatest. The bottom line is that significant uncertainties continue to dog the region's digital currency initiatives.

This paper considers the determinants of
\n exports of modern services and traditional services. It
\n considers the growth of export volumes as well as export
\n surges, that is, the periods of rapid sustained export
\n growth. It asks whether the determinants of export growth
\n rates and export surges differ between merchandise,
\n traditional services, and modern services and whether
\n developing countries are different. It confirm the
\n importance of the real exchange rate for export growth. The
\n paper finds that the effect of the real exchange rate is
\n even stronger for exports of services than for exports of
\n goods and that it is especially strong for exports of modern
\n services. The results suggest that in the course of their
\n development, as developing countries shift from exporting
\n commodities and merchandise to exporting traditional and
\n modern services, appropriate policies toward the real
\n exchange rate become even more important.

This volume--the fifth in a series of histories of the International Monetary Fund--examines the 1990s, a tumultuous decade in which the IMF faced difficult challenges and took on new and expanded roles. Among these were assisting countries that had long operated under central planning to manage transitions toward market economies, helping countries in financial crisis after sudden loss of support from private financial markets, adapting surveillance to reflect the growing acceptance of international standards for economic and financial policies, helping low-income countries grow and begin to eradicate poverty while staying within its mandate as a monetary institution, and providing adequate financial assistance to members in an age of limited official resources. The IMF's successes and setbacks in facing these challenges provide valuable lessons for an uncertain future

Discussions over the past year have yielded agreement on the outlines of what needs to be done to strengthen the global financial architecture. But the task of filling in the details remains.

We assemble data on the structure of bank supervision, distinguishing supervision by the central bank from supervision by a nonbank governmental agency and independent from dependent governmental supervisors. Using observations for 140 countries from 1998 through 2010, we find that supervisory responsibility tends to be assigned to the central bank in low-income countries where that institution is one of few public-sector agencies with the requisite administrative capacity. It is more likely to be undertaken by a non-independent agency of the government in countries ranked high in terms of government efficiency and regulatory quality. We show that the choice of institutional arrangement makes a difference for outcomes. Countries with independent supervisors other than the central bank have fewer nonperforming loans as a share of GDP even after controlling for inflation, per capita income, and country and/or year fixed effects. Their banks are required to hold less capital against assets, presumably because they have less need to protect against loan losses. Savers in such countries enjoy higher deposit rates. There is some evidence, albeit more tentative, that countries with these arrangements are less prone to systemic banking crises.

Using international data starting in 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points, when their per capita incomes reach around US$ 17,000 in year-2005 constant international prices, a level that China should achieve by or soon after 2015. Among our more provocative findings is that growth slowdowns are more likely in countries that maintain undervalued real exchange rates.

This paper reports updated measures of transparency and independence for more than 100 central banks. The indices show that there has been steady movement in the direction of greater transparency and independence over time. In addition, we show that outcomes such as the variability of inflation are significantly affected by both central bank transparency and independence. Disentangling the impact of the two dimensions of central bank arrangements remains difficult, however.

This issue includes the following: mashup indices of development; impact analysis of rural electrification projects in Sub-Saharan Africa; what can we learn about the 'resource curse' from foreign aid? Density and disasters: economics of urban hazard risk; and coping with crises: policies to protect employment and earnings.