This paper examines the economic and financial linkages between Morocco and Tunisia and their European partners. Using structural vector autoregressions, we find that growth shocks in European partner countries generate significant responses on growth in Morocco and Tunisia. For Tunisia, exports...

The driving force of U.S. economic growth is expected to rotate from the fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding in 2009 to private demand in 2010, with consumption and particularly investment expected to be important contributors to growth. The strength of U.S. investment will hence be a...

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...

Italy’s deep-rooted structural problems resulted in an unsatisfactory productivity performance and a dismal growth over the last 15 years. The global financial crisis has exacerbated these long-standing weaknesses, taking a heavy toll on Italy’s economy. With output back to its...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the growth prospects of the Greek economy. It is estimated that exceptional factors boosted growth by 1 percentage point per year in recent years and, under current trends and policies, growth is likely to drop to about 3 percent by the end of the decade. The...

This Selected Issues paper examines the external linkages of the New Zealand economy. Empirical results from vector autoregressive models suggest that economic activity in Australia tends to have more of a significant direct impact on New Zealand than does activity in the United States....

This Selected Issues paper analyzes macroeconomic fluctuations in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The paper describes data, along with the estimation technique used to ensure stationarity of the data. The empirical regularities of macroeconomic fluctuations in the ECCU are...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the underlying sources of growth in Uganda, suggesting that the contribution to growth from total factor productivity has been minor, while the high population growth poses a significant challenge to sustain a rapid improvement in living standards. The paper...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the sources of Mexico’s economic growth since the 1960s, and compares various decompositions of historical growth into trend and cyclical components. The role of the implied output gaps in the inflation process is assessed. The paper presents...

This Selected Issues paper conducts a comparative analysis of the main determinants of GDP per capita growth in New Zealand and in other OECD countries to assess the relative importance of macroeconomic factors, institutional settings, and geographical location in New Zealand’s growth...