Paul Wachtel

In this paper, we show that policymakers can distinguish between good and bad credit booms with high accuracy and they can do so in real time. Evidence from 17 countries over nearly 150 years of modern financial history shows that credit booms that are accompanied by house price booms and a rising loan‐to‐deposit ratio are much more likely to end in a systemic banking crisis than other credit booms. We evaluate the predictive accuracy for different classification models and show that characteristics observed in real time contain valuable information for sorting the data into good and bad booms.

This article is based on a panel discussion on the contribution of the economics of transition literature to the broader understanding of economic and social development. All panel participants have been working in the field for decades and made important contributions to this literature. The transition experience was a social experiment on a scale not seen before, and many lessons were learned that travel beyond the specific region. Important contributions in areas such as political economy, contract theory, and the sequencing and complementarity of reforms were discussed. It was concluded that there is little reason at this point to consider economics of transition and development economics as separate subfields as they share the same intellectual objective, and complement each other in our understanding of the development process.