As a companion piece to the Board paper on Structural Reforms and Macroeconomic Performance: Initial Considerations for the Fund, this paper presents a selection of case studies on the structural reform experiences of member countries. These papers update the Board on work since the Triennial...

This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules...

Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) argue that the relation between openness and growth is still an open question. One of the main problems in the assessment of the effect is the endogeneity of the relation. In order to address this issue, this paper applies the identification through heteroskedasticity...

This paper reviews the recent growth experience of the Greek and Portuguese economies and their determinants, comparing it with the rest of the euro area as well as a large set of other economies. Estimates from fixed effects panel and cross-section regressions are used to estimate how changes...

This paper presents an overview of the different methodologies that can be used to measure the amount of available slack in an economy. A comparison of these alternatives reveals that the evolution of the Nairu is crucial for understanding recent cyclical developments in the French economy. A...

Multilateral Consultations are a new tool of multilateral surveillance for the IMF, designed to foster action-oriented debate and policy actions on a problem of systemic or regional importance. The first multilateral consultation focused on facilitating the resolution of global imbalances while...

The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

This paper presents an econometric model of U.S. current account transactions. The model is used to analyze the factors behind the deterioration in the U.S. external position during the 1980s and to examine the sensitivity of the U.S. current account balance to changes in factors which are its...

This paper considers the demand for various monetary aggregates with a view to assessing their potential roles as intermediate variables for monetary policy. Illustrative estimates using a generalized autoregressive distributed lag model are presented. For M1, the results support an “error...