No abstract

A theoretical model is developed in which both buybacks and the adoption of an IMF programme can be used as screening devices which enable a creditor to discriminate between debtor countries which are willing to use debt relief in order to invest and repay and countries which are not. Asymmetric information is assumed. This problem can be solved if the country has suf®cient resources to engage in a debt buyback and so gain the debt relief. When the country is credit constrained, an alternative screening mechanism is to undertake an IMF programme in return for debt reduction and possibly an IMF loan. US Treasury Secretary N. J. Brady announced a new plan for international debt that would shift the strategy from co-ordinated lending to the reduction, or partial forgiveness, of existing debt. The Brady Plan was premised on a voluntary, market oriented approach to debt reduction. 2 The reason why in Thailand, Korea and Indonesia con®dence was not immediately restored, after the programmes with the IMF were signed, is currently under discussion. The Fund has attributed the continuing decline these countries have experienced (at least until the end of the 1997) mainly to unexpected contagion effects, political uncertainty and poor implementation of the programmes by the government in the regions involved. Instead, Sachs and Radelet (1998a, b) argued that ®nancial panic (as opposed to the`weak fundamentals view' of Krugman, (1998);Corsetti et al. (1998) was an essential element of the Asian crisis and, given this, the design of the Fund programmes added to the panic, rather than diminishing it.

IMF, Economic forecasts, Political influence, C23, D72, F33, F34,

The existence of an empirical relationship between the adoption of an IMF programme and the concession of a debt rescheduling by commercial and o¢cial creditors is tested using a bivariate probit model. If countries who have arrangements with the IMF are more likely than others to obtain a rescheduling of their external debt we could conclude that the adoption of an IMF programme could work as a sort of signal of a country's "good willingness", which is thus rewarded with the debt relief. The results con…rm the existence of a signi…cant e¤ect of the adoption of an IMF programme on the subsequent concession of a debt rescheduling by creditors.

In this letter, we investigate the effects of pansharpening (PS) applied to multispectral (MS) multitemporal images in change-detection (CD) applications. Although CD maps computed from pansharpened data show an enhanced spatial resolution, they can suffer from errors due to artifacts induced by the fusion process. The rationale of our analysis consists in understanding to which extent such artifacts can affect spatially enhanced CD maps. To this end, a quantitative analysis is performed which is based on a novel strategy that exploits similarity measures to rank PS methods according to their impact on CD performance. Many multiresolution fusion algorithms are considered, and CD results obtained from original MS and from spatially enhanced data are compared