In thinking about policy, academic economists alternate between theoretical models in which governments can design finely-tuned optimal interventions and practical considerations which usually assume the government to be incompetent and hostage to special interests. I argue in this paper that...

This study focuses on the role of trade and trade policy in achieving sustained long-term growth in Africa. One major conclusion is that trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa works much the same way that it does elsewhere. High levels of trade restrictions have been an important obstacle to exports...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

The object of this paper is to bring to bear on financial-non financial interactions a richer approach to modeling the determination of long-term interest rates. in a series of previous papers. I have developed an alternative model based explicitly on the truism that any factor affecting...

An earlier paper by the author investigated the quantitative implications, for the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policies, of a model treating the determination of long-term interest rates by explicitly imposing the market clearing equilibrium condition that the quantity of bonds issued...

Standard discussions of flexible inflation targeting as an optimal monetary policy abstract completely from the consequences of monetary policy for the government budget. But at least some of the countries now adopting inflation targeting have substantial difficulty in controlling fiscal...