International payments unions and clearing houses have been employed by 88 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean to liberalise regional trade and payments during the past 50 years. Yet, their impact on participating countries has not been well understood. When the republics of the former Soviet Union were deciding on new monetary regimes, many economists proposed a payments union but could not estimate its potential benefits or risks. This book presents the first fully articulated theory of international payments unions and clearing houses in order to answer the questions: When should a country choose to participate in a payments union? What benefits and costs have actually resulted from existing and past clearing houses? When should countries in a clearing house seek to form a payments union?

International payments unions and clearing houses have been employed by 88 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean to liberalise regional trade and payments during the past 50 years. Yet, their impact on participating countries has not been well understood. When the republics of the former Soviet Union were deciding on new monetary regimes, many economists proposed a payments union but could not estimate its potential benefits or risks. This book presents the first fully articulated theory of international payments unions and clearing houses in order to answer the questions: When should a country choose to participate in a payments union? What benefits and costs have actually resulted from existing and past clearing houses? When should countries in a clearing house seek to form a payments union?

Provides an in-depth overview of the Federal Reserve System, including information about monetary policy and the economy, the Federal Reserve in the international sphere, supervision and regulation, consumer and community affairs and services offered by Reserve Banks. Contains several appendixes, including a brief explanation of Federal Reserve regulations, a glossary of terms, and a list of additional publications.

"The World Scientific Handbook of Futures Markets serves as a definitive source for comprehensive and accessible information in futures markets. The emphasis is on the unique characteristics of futures markets that make them worthy of a special volume. In our judgment, futures markets are currently undergoing remarkable changes as trading is shifting from open outcry to electronic and as the traditional functions of hedging and speculation are extended to include futures as an alternative investment vehicle in traditional portfolios. The unique feature of this volume is the selection of five classic papers that lay the foundations of the futures markets and the invitation to the leading academics who do work in the area to write critical surveys in a dozen important topics."--$cProvided by publisher.

Defines and explains terms related to management, banking, finance, insurance, real estate, investment, data processing, marketing, and economic theory.

The global trend toward lilberalization in countries international payments and transfer systems has been widespread in both industrial and developing countries and most dramatic in Central and Eastern Europe. Countries in general have brought their exchange systems more in line with market principles and moved toward more flexible exchange rate arrangements. This study updates previous studies published under the title Developments in International Exchange and Payments Systems.

In the mid-1980s the international development community helped launch what was to quickly become one of the most popular poverty reduction and local economic development policies of all time. Microcredit, the system of disbursing tiny micro-loans to the poor to help them to establish their own income-generating activities, was initially highly praised and some were even led to believe that it would end poverty as we know it. But in recent years the microcredit model has been subject to growing scrutiny and often intense criticism. The Rise and Fall of Global Microcredit shines a light on many of the fundamental problems surrounding microcredit, in particular, the short- and long-term impacts of dramatically rising levels of microdebt. Developed in collaboration with UNCTAD, this book covers the general policy implications of adverse microcredit impacts, as well as gathering together country-specific case studies from around the world to illustrate the real dynamics, incentives and end results. Lively and provocative, The Rise and Fall of Global Microcredit is an accessible guide for students, academics, policymakers and development professionals alike.

In this book, a historical analysis of the precedents of the euro is examined within the context of the current issues affecting the Eurozone and the long-term effects of the institutional changes implemented since 2010. The book begins by placing the Eurozone challenges in the historical context of previous monetary unions, drawing on the experience of the gold standard. It then specifically focuses on the problems arising from the running of permanent trade imbalances within the Eurozone. The authors explore the advantages and disadvantages of being a member of the Eurozone and attempt to measure the optimality of a currency area by the calculation of an index on internal macroeconomic asymmetries. They address the proposals recently made in favour of a fiscal union in the Euro zone; including the economic and political feasibility of fiscal transfers in the Eurozone. The final two papers discuss whether the monetary union is in fact more than just that, and whether it will lead inevitably to some form of political union if it is to survive. With chapters by leading experts from both Europe and the UK, this book will appeal to students in Economics, Finance, Politics, EU integration and European studies; as well as academics and professional economists doing research in EU integration, the Euro zone, monetary history and monetary and banking unions in Europe, the UK and elsewhere.

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc.