Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) reversed....

Using a two country DGSE combining nominal rigidities and financial frictions, we show that the persistence of output and inflation asymmetries observed since 1999 in an increasingly integrated EMU is not necessarily puzzling. Only the integration of final goods markets unambiguously leads to a...

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...

This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada. ToTEM has been improved along a number of...

The Slovak economy experienced a strong but short recession in 2009. The recovery afterwards was driven by exports and investment. While GDP growth was one of the strongest in OECD, employment did not reach the pre-crisis level and unemployment remains stubbornly high. This paper argues that...

The authors provide a detailed technical description of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM), which replaced the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) in December 2005 as the Bank's principal projection and policy-analysis model for the Canadian economy. ToTEM is an open-economy, dynamic...

Following the seminal contribution of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997), the role of collateral constraints for business cycle fluctuations has been highlighted by several authors and collateralized debt is becoming a popular feature of business cycle models. In contrast, Kocherlakota (2000) and Cordoba...

Using empirical evidence from panel analysis of current account dynamics and of bilateral trade balances, the paper argues that the large German current account surplus during the 2000s can be explained by an increasing gap between productivity growth in manufacturing vis-à-vis services. Such a...

Turkey’s current account deficit widened to almost 10% of GDP in 2011 and has been narrowing only gradually since. An important question is to what extent Turkey’s current account deficit is excessive. To explore this issue, one needs to establish benchmarks. In this paper current account...

Turkey recovered swiftly from the global financial crisis but sizeable macroeconomic imbalances arose in the process. High consumer price inflation and a wide current account deficit are sources of vulnerability. Even though below-potential growth helps rebalancing and disinflation, these...