The gap between the per capita income of most Arab countries and that of advanced industrial countries has widened since the early 1990s. The economic growth performance of the Arab world has been weak by developing country standards, too. Yet, the diversity of growth patterns within this group...

In Lateinamerika hat sich auf breiter Front eine wirtschaftspolitische Umkehr vollzogen. Immer mehr Länder haben gesamtwirtschaftliche Stabilisierungsmaßnahmen ergriffen und sich gegenüber den internationalen Güter- und Kapitalmärkten geöffnet. Zeitpunkt und Umfang der Reformen variieren...

Kritiker der Anpassungspolitik von IWF und Weltbank halten deren Programme für nicht entwicklungsverträglich. Erstens würden die positiven Wachstumswirküngen struktureller Maßnahmen aufgrund einer zu strikten makroökonomischen Stabilisierung weitgehend ausbleiben. Zweitens würden die...

The paper analyses the recent supply side developments in France, Germany, and Italy by employing a non-parametric approach to estimate potential GDP. The analysis reveals marked heterogeneity among the three countries with regard to the contribution made by labour input. Where similarities can...

This paper provides evidence that the choice of the foreign exchange regime is not of first order importance for achieving high output growth. It is argued that due to the forward looking nature of the foreign exchange market, exchange rate stability hinges on the current and anticipated...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

Las causas de la explosión de desempleo y de la escasa creación de empleos ocurridas en la Argentina hasta 1995 y sus perspectivas futuras son los dos hilos conductores de este documento. Aquí se presenta una interpretación que se profundiza para el caso de la Argentina.

The aim of this work is to investigate the role played by the so-called 'globalization' processes of the last couples of decades on the international patterns of technological learning and on the distribution of incomes and growth. First, we re-assess the evidence on the general patterns of the...

Cross-country growth regressions have become an increasingly common tool in empirical development research. But these regressions typically do not attempt to distinguish among countries in different stages of development. Two empirical methods are used to test for such differences. Several of...

In the first years of the eurozone debt crisis, European governments were busy struggling to achieve short-term financial stabilisation of banks and entire countries. Now, after the OMT programme and other stabilisation measures have calmed investors, attention has shifted to two issues:...