Central America has received growing attention as a region that is integrating successfully into the global economy. This paper examines—among other things—the macroeconomic and fiscal implications of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA-DR), noting that the...

The experiences of Caribbean Economic Community countries show that exchange rate depreciation in these countries is inflationary, and that, while changes in the relative prices of tradables may affect exports, tourism, and imports, nominal exchange rate changes have no predictable effect on...

Exchange rate pass-through in a set of euro area prices along the pricing chain is examined. Using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, the empirics analyze the joint time-series behavior of the euro exchange rate and a system of euro-area prices in response to an exchange rate shock. The...

This paper re-examines empirical exchange rate puzzles by focusing on three OECD economies (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) where primary commodities constitute a significant share of their exports. For Australia and New Zealand especially, we find that the U.S. dollar price of their...

This paper examines the performance of different new open economy macroeconomic models in explaining the exchange rate pass-through in a wide range of prices. Quantitative versions of different models are used to derive the dynamic response of various prices to an exchange rate shock. Predicted...

Using both regression- and VAR-based estimates, the paper finds that the exchange rate pass-through to import prices for a large number of countries is incomplete and larger than the pass-through to export prices. Previous studies have reported similar results, which give rise to the puzzle that...

Trade liberalization leads to long-run gains, but it can also involve costly short-run macroeconomic adjustment. The paper explores the relative importance of these effects within a dynamic general equilibrium model that captures key elements of both international trade and macroeconomic models....

In this paper, the IMF's new Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the contribution of unbalanced growth to the decline in the share of goods production in Australia and New Zealand. The simulation results suggest that faster productivity growth in the tradable goods sector in...

We present an extensive analysis of the consequences for global equilibrium determinacy in flexible-price open economies of implementing active interest rate rules, i.e., monetary rules where the nominal interest rate responds more than proportionally to inflation. We show that conditions under...

This paper develops a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy, disaggregated into thirty five national economies. This panel unobserved components model features a monetary transmission mechanism, a fiscal transmission mechanism, and extensive macrofinancial linkages, both within...