The pressure on the Chinese government to appreciate the Chinese yuan is large. Since the start of the dollar's sustained depreciation in early 2002 the western industrialized countries including Japan argue that China's fixed peg is equivalent to a mercantilist trade policy. From the Chinese...

The paper discusses global imbalances under the aspect of an asymmetric world monetary system. It identifies the US and Germany as center countries with rising / high current account deficits (US) and surpluses (Germany). These are matched by current account surpluses of countries stabilizing...

Since the introduction of the euro in January 1999, exchange rate stability at the periphery of the euro area is growing. The paper investigates the impact of exchange rate stability on growth for a sample of 41 mostly small open economies at the EMU periphery. It identifies international trade,...

This paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate in the Bank of Japan’s monetary policy reaction function. In contrast to prior estimations of reaction functions based on the Taylor-rule, we allow for regime shifts by estimating rolling coefficients from January 1974 to March 1999....

The paper scrutinizes the role of wages and capital flows for competitiveness in the new EU member states in the context of real convergence. For this purpose it extends the seminal Balassa-Samuelson model by international capital markets. The augmented Balassa-Samuelson model is linked to the...