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IMFscoff papers Robert Flood Editor and Committee Chair Ratna Sahay and Eswar S. Prasad Co-Editors Jeff Hayden Assistant Editor Alvaro Rojas Research Assistant Sheila Kinsella Administrative Coordinator Editorial Committee Brian Aitken Atish R. Ghosh Tamim Bayoumi Laura Kodres Sharmini Coorey Donald J. Mathieson Tito Cordelia Peter Montiel Liam Ebrill The objective of IMF Staff Papers is to publish high quality research produced by IMF staff and invited guests on a variety of topics of interest to a broad audience including academics and policymakers in the member countries of the Fund. The papers selected for publication in the journal are subject to an extensive review process using both internal and external ref- erees. IMF Staff Papers also welcomes outside comments, criticisms, and interesting replica- tions of published work. The views presented in published papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Executive Board or of the IMF. 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Not for Redistribution International Monetary Fund Volume 46 Number 0 Contents September/December 1999 Determinants and Leading Indicators of Banking Crises: Further Evidence Daniel C. Hardy and Ceyla Pazarbasioglu • 247 Time Series Analysis of Export Demand Equations: A Cross-Country Analysis Abdelhak S. Senhadji and Claudio E. Montenegro • 259 The Uzbek Growth Puzzle Jeromin Zettelmeyer • 274 Monetary Policy and Public Finances: Inflation Targets in a New Perspective Christian H. Beddies • 293 Exchange Rate Fluctuations and Trade Flows: Evidence from the European Union Giovanni Dell'Ariccia • 315 Index of Volume 46 • 335 ©International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution This page intentionally left blank ©International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution IMF Staff Papers Vol. 46, No. 3 (September/December 1999) © 1999 International Monetary Fund Determinants and Leading Indicators of Banking Crises: Further Evidence DANIEL C. HARDY and CEYLA PAZARBASIOGLU* This paper examines episodes of banking system distress and crisis in a large sam- ple of countries to identify which macroeconomic and financial variables can be useful leading indicators. The best warning signs of the recent Asian crises were proxies for the vulnerability of the banking and corporate sector. Full-blown bank- ing crises are shown to be associated more with external developments, and domestic variables are the main leading indicators of severe but contained bank- ing distress. [JEL: E44, G21] ecent events in East Asia have reminded the world of how rapidly and with what R disruptive force banking crises can erupt, and of how difficult it is to foresee the timing and full ramifications of these dramatic events. Yet financial crises have a long history, and in recent decades many countries have experienced financial sector dis- tress of various degrees of severity, and some have suffered repeated bouts (Lindgren, Garcia, and Saal, 1996, provide a listing and discussion). This history lends importance to the identification of conditions under which banking crises are likely to occur so as to preempt them or prepare for their resolu- tion. In this paper we concentrate on finding robust coincident and leading indica- tors that might be available in most countries. Since plausibly the causes of banking system distress differ across economies with different structural characteristics, lead- ing indicators are differentiated by region. In particular, the recent Asian crises are shown to differ in several regards from episodes elsewhere. Furthermore, banking *Daniel Hardy and Ceyla Pazarbasioglu were in the Monetary and Exchange Affairs Department (MAE) when this paper was written. The authors wish to thank William E. Alexander, Timothy Lane, Sunil Sharma, and participants at an MAE seminar for helpful comments and suggestions. Research assis- tance by Jahanara Begum and Kiran Sastry is greatly appreciated. 247 ©International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution Daniel C. Hardy and Ceyla Pazarbasioglu sector difficulties may also differ greatly in severity: some may be categorized as severe distress and others as full-blown crises. Results are presented showing that the precursors of crises and coincident economic developments are rather different from those of severe but limited financial system distress. This study is a contribution to the new but growing body of research that attempts to evaluate econometrically the economic precursors and causes of bank- ing sector weakness or crisis. Some studies, such as Cole and Gunther (1995) for the United States and Gonzalez-Hermosillo, Pazarbasioglu, and Billings (1997) for Mexico, have included as explanatory variables primarily bank-specific vari- ables, and looked at the experience of individual institutions. These results are dif- ficult to generalize, however, because for many countries reliable bank-specific data are rarely available to the more general public on a timely basis, if at all, and so cannot be used to make predictions. Gonzalez-Hermosillo (1999) represents an attempt to overcome some of these limitations. Another and more recent group of studies, to which this paper belongs, focuses primarily on macroeconomic variables and other indicators that are avail- able in most countries on a fairly timely basis. A pioneering work in this area is the study by Kaminsky and Reinhart (1996), which examines the behavior of var- ious macroeconomic indicators during episodes of both banking and currency crises. A paper by Demirguc-Kunt and Detragiache (1998) in this journal, which was written concurrently with the research reported here, examines the determinants of the probability of a banking crisis using annual, macroeconomic data. Their sam- ple includes 31 instances of what are judged to be full-fledged banking crises, rather than more moderate distress. They find that low GDP growth, excessively high real interest rates, and high inflation significantly increase the likelihood of systemic problems. They also find weak evidence that adverse terms of trade shocks and rapid credit growth increase the probability of a banking crisis. The size of the fiscal deficit and the rate of depreciation of the exchange rate do not seem to have an independent effect. An interesting finding is that structural char- acteristics, such as the availability of deposit insurance and the degree of "law and order" achieved by a country, are also relevant. In addition, Demirguc-Kunt and Detragiache present results, albeit from a very small sample, on the determinants of the cost of resolving banking crises.1 Demirguc-Kunt and Detragiache use almost exclusively contemporaneous variables on the right-hand side (only a measure of the growth in bank credit is lagged two periods), and therefore, as the authors acknowledge, the direction of causality is not always unambiguous. By the same token, their findings are of only limited usefulness in predicting crises in advance. On a more methodological issue, their emphasis on coincident indicators hampers the identification of dynamic fea- tures of the lead-up to banking crises, such as cyclical turning points. Nor do they distinguish periods in which banking sector difficulties may be incubating but have not yet reached crisis levels from more normal periods of economic activity. 1Eichengreen and Rose (1998) is another related paper, which concentrates on the influence of world- wide economic trends on the incidence of banking crises in developing countries. 248 ©International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution DETERMINANTS AND LEADING INDICATORS OF BANKING CRISES Furthermore, they apply a common methodology