Seit der zweiten Hälfte der 90er Jahre wird das Wachstum in Ostdeutschland zunehmend vom Außenhandel getragen. Dabei lagen in den vergangenen zehn Jahren die Exportzuwächse der neuen Bundesländer – ausgehend von einem niedrigen Niveau – deutlich über den Zuwächsen in Westdeutschland....

Several empirical papers have shown that international trade has a positive causal effect on a country's GDP or growth rate. A common conclusion from these results is that a free trade policy will increase a country's GDP. This comment does not dispute the empirical findings per se but questions...

Existing literature repeatedly documented a strong correlation between trade and growth. It has also shown a causal effect of imports (though not necessarily exports) on growth in simultaneous equation models but to a lesser extent in Granger-causality tests. Export and import taxes have...

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...

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:...

The economic power of the euro countries should be strengthened by growth incentives, in the form of an additional European growth fund, which should also be funded by financial transaction tax revenues. The current level of debt requires a strengthening of government revenues. Taxes must be...

The 2010 European debt crisis has revived the discussion concerning the optimum adjustment strategy in the face of asymmetric shocks. Whereas Mundell's (1961) seminal theory on optimum currency areas suggests depreciation in the face of crisis, the most recent emergence of competitive...