This paper examines, in the context of future EMU membership of the Central and Eastern European countiries (CEECs), the interaction between fiscal policy and the price level in different exchange rate regimes. The theoretical framework is based on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL)....

The current research emphasis on institutions as key determinants of economic performance, rather than on resources and resource productivity, has uncovered important questions for further research. For example, if institutions are central to economic performance, then what explains observed...

Institutions either promote or constrain economic performance, but which parts of institutions advance or restrict performance, and why do economies sharing similar institutions sometimes perform differently? This paper is a modest attempt at addressing a small part of these questions. It...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...

This paper analyses the 1980s Latin American debt crisis in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and, in particular, the influence of cumulative processes at work in its early and final stages. The paper is organised in three sections. The first examines the crisis<92> features in the three countries, and...</92>

We use two methodologies, the least square dummy variables approach and the dynamic factor models, to decompose the labor productivity growth rate for a large sample of countries into common, i.e. global, and idiosyncratic, i.e. country, components. We find that country specific effects are much...

The paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993. It is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries, and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between...

We study the capital structure dynamics of Central and Eastern European firms in order to get a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative development of the financial systems in this region. The dynamic model we use endogenizes the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed...

Factor-endowment based trade with the leading economy helps to explain the differing development performances of the Americas and East Asia in the past two centuries. Between 1830 and 1945, labor-abundant Britain, the most advanced country, traded heavily with land-abundant countries in the...