The economic performance of the Pacific island countries has been, at best, mixed and in many cases quite poor for an extended period of time.

One of the primary responsibilities of economics is to build a good indicator of the magnitude of short term disequilibrium. Knowledge of the magnitude of the excess demand in the economy is essential for conducting fiscal and monetary policy. In a period of contraction when monetary policy is...

A popular strategy for estimating output gaps is to anchor them to structural economic relationships. The resulting output gaps, however, are often highly sensitive to numerous auxiliary assumptions inherent in the approach. This complicates their use in policymaking. We illustrate the point...

Rising consumer prices may reflect shifts by consumers to new higher-priced products, mostly for durable and semi-durable goods. I apply Bils’ (2009) methodology to newly available Canadian consumer price data for non-shelter goods and services to estimate how price increases can be divided...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy,exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

This paper presents a new mixed frequency methodology to estimate output gaps and potential output on a quarterly basis. The methodology strongly relies on the production function method commonly agreed at the European level (D'Auria et.al.,2010) but it significantly improves it allowing to...

This study estimates the output gaps for Pakistan, using both the statistical and the structural methods and comparing their results. Though they show some degree of association, the measures reveal inherent differences in the measures of output gap. Based on the annual data of GDP (1951-2007)...