The goal of the paper is to decompose gross exports/imports to/from Germany for seven selected economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia for 2000 and 2014, to identify the role of German in absorbing, reflecting,...

This paper evaluates the usefulness of business sentiment indicators for forecasting developments in the Chinese real economy.We use data on diffusion indices collected by the People's Bank of China for forecasting industrial production, retail sales and exports.Our bivariate vector...

Ways of extracting financial condition indices (FCI) are explored and alternative FCIs external to the Chinese economy are constructed to model their predictive content. The exploration aims at highlighting the rich and varied dynamic features of financial variables underlying FCIs and the...

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series relative to an aggregate of industrialized countries, this paper provides new evidence on the dynamic effects of government spending and technology shocks on the real exchange rate and the terms of trade. To achieve identification, we derive...