Effective Fund surveillance over the members of currency unions entails discussions at the regional level. This requirement derives from the fact that currency union members have devolved responsibility for policy areas that are central to Fund surveillance, notably monetary and exchange rate...

Over the past decade, the United States has been very successful atcreating jobs. Some other industrial countries have clearly lagged behind. But what is the reason why some countries are more successful than others at creating employment? Are there common factors that explainjob creation? This...

Increased globalization - the international integration of markets forgoods, technology, labor, and capital - has coincided in the past 20years with a shift in demand from less-skilled workers to those with moreskills. Have imports from developing countries been responsible for thelowered wages...

The paper examines labor market developments in the four hard-peg European Union (EU) accession candidates during transition, with a view toward understanding the persistent high unemployment experienced in each country. Despite the significant levels of unemployment in all four countries, labor...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the regional labor markets for Belgium. The paper examines labor market performance, and argues that a number of factors—poor worker-job matching, a compressed wage structure, and low geographical mobility—contribute to economic disparities. The paper...

The GCC growth model has delivered substantial improvements in living standards over several decades. Access to foreign labor has supported rapid growth in the non-oil sector and price stability in the region. It has also resulted in positive spillovers to the migrant-sending countries through...

In designing policy measures, including possible social safety nets, targeted to the poor, it is important to fully understand the efficiency implications of these measures. There is abundant macroeconomic literature on their negative effects on the poor’s work effort. The literature, however,...

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority leads least squares estimates to understate the true growth consequences of monetary policy interventions. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on real output growth for several European...