The structural rate of unemployment and associated non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (the NAIRU) are of major importance to the analysis of macro and structural economic developments, although in practice these concepts are not well defined and there is considerable uncertainty and...

A survey of the literature on asset price impacts on the real economy shows a much wider range of work on consumption and related wealth effects than on investment. The existence of wealth effects on consumption is little contested, but there remains an issue of whether different effects should...

This paper surveys recent advances in empirical studies of the monetary transmission mechanism (MTM), with special attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Our results indicate that the strength of the exchange rate pass-through substantially declined over time mainly due to a fall in...

The bulk of recent literature on foreign-exchange interventions has overlooked the potential interdependencies that may exist between these operations and the conduct of monetary policy. This is the case even under inflation targeting and especially in emerging-market economies, because central...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...