We describe the relation between welfare growth and productivity growth. We argue that differences in productivity and productivity growth between sectors or countries are irrelevant from a policy perspective. Specialisation is based on the comparative advantages of countries. Since, by nature,...

This paper examines whether terms of trade shocks have an asymmetric effect on private savings in transition economies. A simple three-period framework is developed to show that, in the presence of binding credit constraints in bad states of nature, savings rates can be sensitive to favorable...

This paper examines the determinants of Uganda’s inflation rate during 1994M7-2005M6. We test the central hypothesis that Uganda’s inflation rate is always and everywhere a non-monetary phenomenon. A theoretical background relating inflation to monetary and other non-monetary factors is...

In this paper, we present a technique to decompose changes in factor prices into the contribution of major determinants, namely movements in domestic and international prices, changes in capital and labour quantities, and technological progress. This is done in an open-economy framework. While...

Although the empirical literature is not unanimous about the existence of a continuous long-term deterioration in the terms of trade for commodities (the original and most common formulation of the Prebisch- Singer hypothesis) and, hence, about the possibility of inferring their future behaviour...

This paper looks at the evolution of the terms of trade between commodities and manufactures in the twentieth century. A statistical analysis of the relative price series for 24 commodities and of eight indices reveals a significant deterioration in their barter terms of trade over the course of...

This paper tests the relative version of purchasing power parity (PPP) for a set of ten Asian developing countries using panel cointegration framework. We employ 'between-dimension' dynamic OLS estimator as proposed by Pedroni (2001b). The test results overwhelmingly reject the PPP hypothesis.

We apply Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) theory to the analysis of long- run equilibrium in the foreign exchange market. We study the case of Portugal vis-à-vis Germany and Spain, and the case of Spain vis-à-vis Germany, in the period 1960-1990. The empirical analysis was based on unit-root...