The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Access to finance has always been a challenge for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but the need to address this issue became more pronounced after the global financial crisis, as SMEs are perceived as engines of growth and job creation. However, lack of consistent indicators for SME finance at the country level restricts cross‐country analyses. The present paper introduces a supply‐side data set to fill this gap, and provides the first set of analyses with this new data set. Global SME lending volume is predicted as $US10tn, 70% of which is in high‐income OECD countries. On average, SME loans constitute 13 and 3% of GDP in developed and developing countries, respectively.

Financial account liberalizations since the second half of the 1980s paved the way for the burgeoning literature that investigates foreign exchange market efficiency in emerging markets (EMs) via testing for the uncovered interest parity (UIP) condition. This paper is the first to provide a broad and critical survey on this recent literature. Specifically, we attempt to answer the following questions. First, are the EMs different from the developed economies in the context of the UIP condition? Second, to what extent can these differences contribute to the debate on the UIP literature? Third, what are the empirical challenges specific to the EMs in testing for the UIP condition?

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.