After the introduction of a preannounced crawling peg exchange rate regime in Hungary in March 1995, forward and futures rates of more than six months maturity exceeded the upper edge of the projected target zone of the Forint. This paper examines whether this fact reflects an additional...

The drift-adjustment method estimates the expected rate of depreciation within an exchange rate band by simple equations. Papers applying this method claim that, while forecasting a freely floating currency is hopeless, predicting an exchange rate within the future band is successful. This paper...

This paper analyses the synchronization of business cycles between new and old EU members using various measures. The main findings are that Hungary, Poland and Slovenia have achieved a high degree of synchronization for GDP, industry and exports, but not for consumption and services. The other...

Using a panel of 21 OECD countries and 40 years of annual data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have business cycles that fluctuate more closely. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP)...