This paper assesses the contribution of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Germany’s ongoing economic crisis, a vicious circle of decline in which the country has become stuck since the early 1990s. It is argued that the ECB continues the Bundesbank tradition of asymmetric policymaking: the...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson effect in 9 CEECs . Using panel cointegration techniques, we find strong empirical evidence in favour of what we call the internal transmission mechanism since productivity growth in the open sector is found to bring about non-tradable inflation. However,...

This paper examines two issues. First, we compare, based on the ratio of output-gap variability to inflation variability, the monetary policy performance of eleven EMU countries for the whole period of the EMS. Second, we examine whether the introduction of an implicit inflation- targeting by...