Subsequent to the economic difficulties of the 1980s, many Latin American governments reluctantly began to introduce market-oriented reform measures. In many cases, the new measures were adopted only as a means of participating in debt-relief programs such as the Brady Initiative. In no case,...

A theoretical model of the inflationary process in Nigeria is developed using monetary aggregates, the exchange rate, and the implicit cost of holding idle cash balances. Parameter estimation is accomplished using quarterly data for 1970:1 through 1993:4 and a nonlinear ARMAX procedure....

An overview of modeling and forecasting methodologies for price trends and other macroeconomic variables in Latin America is provided. Five approaches are reviewed within the time series and econometric traditions from which they are selected. Each method is reviewed within the context of data...

Florida is one of the most internationally oriented regional economies in North America. During the 1990s, trade and investment flows in Florida changed substantially. This was partly due to new international trade agreements and partly due to improved economic performances observed in major...

El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico jointly form one of the largest border economies in the world. They have grown substantially in recent years and face a number of policy challenges. Topics reviewed include population, employment, incomes, retail trade, international commuting...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on output in the euro area. For this purpose we develop a DSGE Fiscal Model with endogenous government bond yields to assess the impact of different fiscal policy shocks on output, its components and on government debt. The simulations suggest...

This paper examines the effect of economic crises on structural unemployment using an Autoregressive Distributed Lags model and accounting for the role of institutional settings. Analysing an unbalanced panel of 30 OECD economies from 1970 to 2008, we found that downturns have, on average, a...

In this working paper, we decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than responding to output variations. We also found that while the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between the volatility of government consumption and country size. Using a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000 the main findings of our empirical analysis suggest that: 1) smaller countries have more volatile non-discretionary and...