The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

The analyses of the international investment position and balance of payments statistics suggest that foreign assets held abroad are greatly underestimated, in particular in the sector of portfolio investments. The aim of this work is to test this hypothesis and to estimate the magnitude of...

The paper presents the new data collection and the estimation methodology for the external statistics, the results of the comparison between the old and the new data in the overlapping period and the evolution of the Italian balance of payments and international investment position since the...

The substantial amount of undeclared foreign assets reported by disclosure schemes and analyses of international balance of payments statistics suggest that foreign assets held by Italians, as is the case in other countries, are greatly underestimated, in particular in the sector of portfolio...

This paper analyzes the investment choices of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) by country and industry in the last twenty years. Assets under management increased from $500 billion in 1995 to $4.7 trillion at end-2011. Based on a specially constructed data set, comprising 2,740 equity deals...

Current account (CA) dispersion within European Union (EU) member states has been increasing progressively since the 1990s. Interestingly, the persistent deficits in many peripheral countries have not been accompanied by a significant growth process able to stimulate a log run rebalancing as...

This paper argues that the lack of timely and decisive policy action to correct domestic and external imbalances contributed crucially to the build-up of financial excesses that led to the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We focus on 2002-07 and perform a number of counterfactual...

This paper examines the relationship between international production and exports for a number of countries. In the theoretical literature the relationship between direct investment and trade is not certain apriori: some works emphasize their complementarity, others their reciprocal...

This work attempts to quantify the size of the adjustment of the United States external imbalance which can arise from a depreciation of the dollar, an adjustment of the Government�s budget in the United States and an acceleration of the technological process in other main advanced...

A two-country model that incorporates many features proposed in the New Open Economy Macroeconomics literature is developed in order to replicate the volatility of the real exchange rate and its disconnect with macroeconomic variables. The model is estimated using data for the euro area and the...