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The bursting of the subprime mortgage market in the United States in 2008 and the ensuing global financial crisis were associated with a rapid decline in global trade. The extent of the trade collapse was unprecedented: trade flows fell at a faster rate than had been observed even in the early years of the great depression. G-20 leaders held their first crisis-related summit in November 2008. The goal was to understand the root causes of the global crisis and to reach consensus on actions to address its immediate effects. In the case of trade, a key question concerned the extent to which a drying up of trade finance caused the observed decline in trade flows. This book brings together a range of projects and studies undertaken by development institutions, export credit agencies, private bankers, and academics to shed light on the role of trade finance in the 2008-09 great trade collapse. It provides policy makers, analysts, and other interested parties with analyses and assessments of the role of governments and institutions in restoring trade finance markets. A deeper understanding of the complexity of trade finance remains critical as the world economy recovers and the supply of trade finance improves. The international community continues to know too little about the fragility of low income economies in response to trade finance developments and shocks, as well as about the ability and conditions of access to trade finance by small and medium enterprises and small banks in developing countries. Similarly, there is uncertainty regarding the impact on trade finance of recent changes in the third Basel regulatory framework.

In the spring of 2012, the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan and the World Bank commissioned a diagnostic assessment of financial practices and strategies among urban and rural Bhutanese. The resulting survey, the Bhutan financial inclusion focus group survey, represents one of the first efforts to capture household financial management practices in the country. The assessment, undertaken at the request of a government working group led by the Royal Monetary Authority, was designed to inform Bhutan's Financial Inclusion Policy by providing information about households' use of and demand for financial services. Since the research mainly captures the perspectives of Bhutanese households, this report does not present recommendations. Instead, its findings from the field research provide qualitative evidence that has informed the financial inclusion policy by highlighting opportunities and challenges in increasing financial inclusion.

Population aging is placing enormous pressures on the pension benefits governments are able to provide. The former transition economies of the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe (CESE) face unique challenges. The growth of their aging populations outpaces other European countries, while the growth of their financial markets (essential to fund pension provisions) lags behind. With support and direction from the ERSTE Foundation, an Austrian group focused on Central European policy issues, a World Bank team investigated the challenges faced by these countries against the background of international experience from the OECD countries and Latin America. 'Aging Population, Pension Funds, and Financial Markets: Regional Perspectives and Global Challenges for Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe' examines how well the financial systems in the CESE economies were prepared for the challenges of multipillar pension reform, how ready they are for the approaching payout of benefits to the first participants, whether returns from pension funds can be sustained in an aging population, and how determined policy actions might be implemented to complete financial market development.

Tunisia’s past integration policies have significantly increased FDI flows in the manufacturing sector, triggering a rise of textiles and clothing and mechanical and electrical components exports through participation to EU production networks and increasing productivity, growth, and job creation. In spite of these results, important challenges remain. FDI increases are not accompanied by a rapid increase in domestic investment. The business climate of the domestic market-oriented sector can be further improved. Trade integration largely has bypassed non-tourism service sectors and the structural transformation of the service sector is slow.This study: (i) examines the key integration challenges that the country’s manufacturing sector is facing; (ii) examine the key remaining reforms needed to further enhance the competitive position of the country; and (iii) identifies the specific policy reforms needed to realize the largely untapped potential in services. The report reviews the entry, business, and trade restrictions in Tunisia’s backbone service sectors (telecommunication, banking, air transport, accounting, auditing, and legal services) using a well-focused regulatory questionnaire. The restrictiveness indices derived from the regulatory diagnostic analysis allow us to assess Tunisia's relative performance. Some key regulatory reform options are proposed and their impact estimated. The study examines the prospect for further increasing exports and off shoring of a large number of services for which Tunisia has demonstrated a real export capacity.

In Crépey (Math. Finance 25:23–50, 2015 ), a basic reduced-form counterparty risk modelling approach was introduced under a standard immersion hypothesis between a reference filtration and the filtration progressively enlarged by the default times of the two parties. This basic setup, with a related continuity assumption on some of the data at the first default time of the two parties, is too restrictive for wrong-way and gap risk applications, such as counterparty risk on credit derivatives. This paper introduces an extension of the basic approach, implements it through marked default times and applies it to counterparty risk on credit derivatives.

In this work, for a reference filtration F, we develop a method for computing the semimartingale decomposition of F-martingales in a specific type of enlargement of F. As an application, we study the progressive enlargement of F with a sequence of non-ordered default times and show how to deduce results concerning the first-to-default, kth-to-default, k-out-of-n-to-default or all-to-default events. In particular, using this method, we compute explicitly the semimartingale decomposition of F-martingales under the absolute continuity condition of Jacod.

The functionality of the new system based on market relations and open for the people is often marked by dynamism, uncertainty, risk, even by hostility and undoubtedly will be affected by the current economic and financial crisis. Negative effects within this segment of national economy could be reduced through land plots consolidation, development of agricultural market on the Best Practices base. Its considered economic mechanisms for the increase of land plots production through irrigation, landscaping, soil protection, etc. The specific of small agricultural exploitations is that entrepreneur is owner, manager, investor, worker at the same time, and must have a wide range of knowledge to achieve the success and to do all rolls mentioned above in a proper way.

We estimate the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on labor supply using local variation in knowledge about the EITC schedule. We proxy for EITC knowledge in a Zip code with the fraction of individuals who manipulate reported self-employment income to maximize their EITC refund. This measure varies significantly across areas. We exploit changes in EITC eligibility at the birth of a child to estimate labor supply effects. Individuals in high-knowledge areas change wage earnings sharply to obtain larger EITC refunds relative to those in low-knowledge areas. These responses come primarily from intensive-margin earnings increases in the phase-in region.

In a market where sellers solicit certification to overcome asymmetric information, we show that the profit of a monopolistic certifier can be hump-shaped in its reputation for accuracy: a higher accuracy attracts high-quality sellers but sometimes repels low-quality sellers. As a consequence, reputational concerns may induce the certifier to reduce information quality, thus depressing welfare. The entry of a second certifier impacts reputational incentives: when sellers only solicit one certifier, competition plays a disciplining role and the region where reputation is bad shrinks. Conversely, this region may expand when sellers hold multiple certifications. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.