This Selected Issues Paper on Iran reviews that monetary factors are the main determinants of inflation in the country. Government spending out of oil revenues leads to large liquidity injections that the central bank accommodates owing to its efforts to prevent a significant nominal...

This Selected Issues paper of Portugal highlights the discussions on the requirement of policies to overcome structural and cyclical impediments to growth, and secure fiscal consolidation. It analyzes the strength of the company balance sheets in supporting the rebound from recession, and also...

This Selected Issues paper on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) underlies key features of business cycles. To obtain new measures of classical and growth cycles, simple rules were applied to date turning points in the classical business cycle, and a recently developed frequency domain...

Despite the external origin of the financial crisis, the potential impact on India’s corporate sector could be large, as India has become increasingly integrated with the global economy in the past decade. The Selected Issues paper discusses India’s economic development and...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes external shocks and business cycle fluctuations in Mexico. The paper examines the relative importance of U.S. demand shocks—and other foreign disturbances—in explaining Mexican output fluctuations. It identifies the dynamic response of...

This Selected Issues paper for Canada presents comprehensive and broad-based analysis of the role of domestic and external shocks. Canada’s economic history illustrates the important role played by external as well as domestic macroeconomic disturbances. Canada’s economy slowed in...

In this paper we study the structural determinants of differentials in unemployment rates and labour markets’ performance for colombian cities. Following the framework proposed by Elhorst (2003) and using cross-sectional data for 23 metropolitan areas, we apply an extension of a principal axes...

U.S. shocks explain a large part of French output common components. This paper analyzes the economic implications of two alternative welfare financing reforms: a reduction in payroll taxes funded by an increase in consumption taxes, and the other funded by a new levy on business value added....

Overall competitiveness of the Dutch economy seems adequate, but domestically produced exports have lost market share recently. Over the past three decades, globalization has greatly influenced economies as countries have become more integrated. Empirical studies on business cycles...