This paper analyses the determinants of inflation differentials and price levels across the euro area countries. Dynamic panel estimations for the period 1999-2006 show that inflation differentials are primarily determined by cyclical positions and inflation persistence. The persistence in...

The present System of National Accounts (SNA93) treats durable consumption goods as consumption goods rather than investment although rentals for owner occupied households is imputed into GDP. We argue that households de facto treat the purchase of durable goods as investments and thus, the...

Fiscal positions of African countries have improved significantly during the past decade. Higher economic growth, better terms of trade, improved donor support notably through debt relief and better control of expenditure contributed to this improvement. But at the same time government revenue...

This paper defines economic slumps as sequences of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among 138 countries, and then examine the phases of decline and their duration. In some countries declines last extremely long, and we put...

Why is GDP so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? To answer this question, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties, which are subject to imperfectly correlated shocks. As in endogenous growth models,...

We analyse the link between supply chains and the extent to which the Great Recession has affected national economies. Our analysis is in two steps, namely first for value added measures of supply chains and then for the Grubel-Lloyd index using gross-export data. Regarding value added measures...

This paper examines the house price dynamics for thirteen European countries. A Markov-switching error correction model is estimated on house price returns at the country level, with deviations between house prices and fundamentals feeding into the short-run dynamics. The system is assumed to be...

This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of regional house price cycles. Based on a newly available data set consisting of the 40 largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we introduce a wavelet transform based metric to study the housing cycle synchronization across MSAs. We...

This paper argues that the key issue for defining and solving the Eurozone’s (EZ) difficulties lies in readjusting the relationship between the centre and the periphery of the EZ. Our argument proceeds in two steps. Firstly, the basic finance problem of a centre-periphery system is captured by...