The economic recovery in CESEE has strengthened further in recent months, resulting in a number of additional upgrades to our growth forecasts for 2021, to 5.4% on the regional average. This good performance has been built on two important foundation stones: the adaptation of the CESEE economies...

There is a significant controversy among academics and policy-makers about whether policies matter for economic growth. Recently, Acemoglu et al. (2003) and Easterly (2004) have presented empirical evidence against the commonly held view that policies play an important role in the process of...

In this paper we construct Financial Conditions Indices (FCIs) for the euro area, for the period 2003 to 2011, using a wide range of prices, quantities, spreads and survey data, grounded in the theoretical literature. One FCI includes monetary policy variables, while two versions of the FCI...