Adolfo Barajas
Email: abarajas@imf.org
Adolfo Barajas, a native of Colombia, is a Senior Economist in the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the IMF, where he has been working since August of 2009. He has been at the IMF for 16 years. Prior to working on the Middle East, he worked on various Central American and Caribbean economies in the Western Hemisphere Department, and was a lecturer and researcher for ten years at the IMF Institute. Before coming to the Fund, he was a Senior Economist in Colombia’s Central Bank Research Department, and a researcher at Fedesarrollo, a private think tank in Bogotá, Colombia. His research interests have included diverse topics related to international macroeconomics and financial sector issues, such as credit growth, the macroeconomic impact and determinants of workers’ remittances, exchange rate regimes and their policy implications, inflation targeting, dollarization, financial crises, and banking sector issues. Mr. Barajas obtained his PhD in Economics from Stanford University and his BA in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia.
Papers Published in World Economics:
Further Fallout from the Global Financial Crisis
We examine the recent credit slowdown in emerging markets from three analytical angles. First, we find that, similar to past history, a credit boom preceded the current slowdown in many emerging markets, and argue that, going forward, a protracted period of sluggish growth is likely. Second, we focus on a relatively understudied region – the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – using a more detailed banking data. We uncover a key role played by bank funding, in particular, deposit growth and external borrowing slowed considerably, despite expansionary monetary policy. Finally, we show that bank-level fundamentals – capitalisation and loan quality – helped to explain differences in credit growth across banks and countries.
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