The Irish economy's heavy pre-crisis dependence on a credit-fuelled property price and construction bubble meant that it suffered more financial instability than most countries in the downturn 2008–2012 with the failure of the bulk of the banking system, heavy official and private debt and a severe employment decline. Faced with a sudden stop of international market funding, the Irish government had recourse to an EU-IMF financial support programme at the end of 2010. Reviewing the broad parameters of the programme this paper argues that, while a sharp fiscal adjustment was necessary, adverse distributional consequences were partly mitigated by government. But the programme should have embodied better international risk-sharing through financial engineering. Ireland's experience in financial crisis management and crisis resolution points to the importance of building and maintaining trust.

Partial credit guarantee schemes have experienced renewed interest from governments keen to promote financial access for small enterprises, not least as a response to the credit crunch in advanced economies. While the market can find uses for partial credit guarantees, the attractions for public policy can be illusory: indeed their most attractive feature for myopic politicians may be the ease with which the true cost of guarantees can be understated, at least at the outset. In practice, the actual fiscal cost of existing schemes has varied widely across countries and has represented a high per dollar subsidy in some cases. Despite the recent application of some innovative techniques, the social benefit of such schemes has proved difficult to estimate, not least because their goals have been vague. Operational design has influenced the cost and apparent effectiveness of different schemes and has also varied widely. Clear and precise goals, against which performance is regularly monitored, realistic pricing verified by consistent and transparent accounting, and attention to the incentive features of operational design, especially for the intermediaries, are among the prerequisites for such schemes to have a good chance of truly achieving improvements in social welfare.

This paper presents estimates, for more than 160 countries, of the fraction of the adult population using formal financial intermediaries. The estimates are constructed by combining information on account numbers at banks and microfinance institutions (together with banking depth and GDP data) with estimates from household surveys for a smaller set of countries. An illustrative application of the data compares them with information on poverty: there is a correlation, but it is not clearly causal.

In recent decades, a majority of countries have experienced a systemic banking crisis requiring a major – and expensive – overhaul of their banking system. Budgetary outlays, whether immediate or deferred, have exceeded 50% of GDP in some cases. This paper uses cross-country econometric evidence to examine whether the design of crisis containment and resolution policies can systematically influence the overall magnitude of fiscal costs. We find that accommodating policies such as blanket deposit guarantees, open-ended liquidity support, repeated partial recapitalizations, debtor bail-outs and regulatory forbearance all tend to add significantly and sizably to fiscal costs.

ServŽn for useful suggestions. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. DOES FINANCIAL REFORM RAISE OR REDUCE SAVING? By Oriana Bandiera*, Gerard Caprio Jr.**, Patrick Honohan* * and Fabio Schiantarelli* (*Boston College, **World Bank) The effect of financial liberalization on private saving is theoretically ambiguous, not only because the link between interest rate levels and saving is itself ambiguous, but also because financial liberalization is a multi-dimensional and phased process, sometimes involving reversals. Some dimensions, such as increased household access to consumer credit or housing finance, might also work to reduce private savings rather than increasing them. Furthermore, the long-term effect of liberalization on savings may differ substantially from the impact effect. Using Principal Components, we construct a 25-year time series index of financial

This paper assesses the benefits and risks associated with dollarization of bank deposits. We provide novel empirical evidence on the determinants of deposit dollarization, its role in promoting financial development, and on whether dollarization is associated with financial instability. We find that: (a) the credibility of macroeconomic policy and the quality of institutions are both key determinants of cross-country variations in dollarization; (b) dollarization is likely to promote financial deepening only in a high inflation environment; and (c) financial instability is likely higher in dollarized economies. The implications of these findings for financial sector and monetary policies are briefly discussed.