Since the late 1990s there have been substantial changes in the current account balances of a number of economies, most notably a marked widening in the current account deficit of the United States and increased net lending by many developing nations to developed economies. This paper uses panel...

This paper demonstrates that the response of the current account to shocks depends on the degree of persistence of these shocks. This result is in accordance with standard intertemporal models that incorporate both consumption smoothing and an investment response to shocks. The estimation...

The large recent US current account deficits have been the subject of an enormous amount of study in academia, among government and central bank economists, in business economic reports, and in the press. Many different explanations of the cause of the deficit have been offered, and to varying...

This paper documents the clear change of view, which has taken place in Australia over the past three decades or so, concerning the relevance of the current account deficit for policy. Historical experience under a fixed exchange rate regime suggested that large persistent deficits were...

We analyse the determinants of Australia’s exchange rate in terms of the approach introduced by Williamson (1983), based on the simultaneous attainment of internal and external balance. Internal balance implies that the economy is operating at its supply potential with no inflationary...

Recent macroeconomic experience has drawn attention to the importance of interdependence among countries through financial markets and institutions, independently of traditional trade linkages. This paper develops a model of the international transmission of shocks due to interdependent...

Conventional wisdom is that some capital flows are inherently more volatile than others. However, our investigation of the statistical properties of these flows shows that no regular relationships exist to suggest that the particular composition of capital flows can help to explain the overall...

The Australian economy has proven resilient to sizable exchange rate fluctuations over the post-float period. In part this can be attributed to financial institutions and non-financial firms learning to adapt to swings in the Australian dollar. This has included the increased use of financial...

The correlation of Australian output with that of the OECD, and the United States in particular, has been well documented. This paper explores foreign linkages by looking at the production side of the national accounts for Australia and the United States, which is often characterised as the...

This paper investigates the merits of aggregate inflation targeting compared with non-traded inflation targeting using a model of a small open economy producing traded and non-traded goods. An important innovation of our approach is that we isolate the effects of exchange rate, supply and demand...