The experience of the five examined industries (agro-food in Chile, cut flowers in Kenya,garment in Lesotho and in Mauritius and seafood in Thailand) demonstrates that non-traditional industries can emerge and achieved strong growth rates in very diverse settings in terms of geography and...

This paper discusses major policy issues related to commodity dependence and export diversification in low-income countries. Contrary to some widely-held view, it argues that natural resources are not necessarily a ‘curse’ that condemns low-income countries to underdevelopment but can...

The introduction of a common monetary policy in eleven European countries increased the need for leading indicators for that area. A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...

The paper analyzes two questions: (i) the effect of a monetary policy shock on the business cycle and (ii) the extent to which a shift in a monetary policy affects the dynamics of business cycle. Unlike previous literature, to answer these questions, we measure cycle movements by calculating an...

We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977-2002. We find that the upper tail of the distribution is consistent with a Pareto power-law type...

This paper analyses the information content of M1 for euro area real GDP since the beginning of the 1980s. After a literature review on the empirical results in individual euro area countries we review some theoretical arguments why real narrow money growth might be an important determinant of...

Empirically R&D expenditure moves pro-cyclically, but the pro- cyclicality is a puzzle from the Schumpeterian point of view. The paper examines the cyclical property of R&D expenditure in the context of endogenous growth, and concludes that (i) substitutability between investing in physical...