This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries’ external balance, including the oil trade balance, the non-oil trade balance, the current account and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975–2004. We...

This paper documents the effects of exchange rates and the external constraint during the interwar years. In the absence of international policy coordination, exchange rate depreciation is shown to have been a necessary precondition for the adoption of policies promoting recovery from the Great...

Using annual data drawn from 1963-1983 we estimate an econometric model of the balance of payments of oil-importing LDCs. The model consists of equations for the quantities of exports and imports, unit value indices for exports and imports, capital flows, reserves and the exchange rate. An...

Spain's financial position during the late 19th and early 20th century has usually been presented as one of persistent deficit on current account, which resulted from her integration into international commodity and factor markets and this, in turn, slowed down growth. In this essay a...

If a nation fails to satisfy its intertemporal budget constraint (IBC) then, like a government or a household, either it will become insolvent or it can consume more of its income. The main purpose of this paper is to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a nation to satisfy its IBC,...

This paper gives a valuation formula for LDC debt that is used to assess: i) the price at which a buy-back of the debt is advantageous to the country (we shall see that it is likely to be half the observed market price); ii) the value to the creditors of having the flows of payment guaranteed...

Using a standard complete specialization model of a small open economy within a rigorous intertemporal optimization framework and with contract-based wage rigidity, we show that permanent tariffs lead to a current account deterioration and a fall in employment, contradicting most of the...

The impact of protection on economic growth is one of the traditional issues in economic history, which has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection with the ratio of custom...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the potential pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection in six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (i.e., whether it redistributes income from rich to poor households). We also explore the extent to which the barriers faced by SSA...

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last four decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...