The euro area as a whole has experienced a marked downward trend in inflation over the past decades and, concomitantly, a protracted period of depressed activity. Can permanent and gradual shifts in monetary policy be held responsible for these dynamics? To answer this question, we embed...

This article assesses monetary policy’s performances in the Euro zone in the face of supply shocks. We determine the responses of output, inflation, labor share and the nominal interest rate to a supply shock as identified through a structural var model. We then develop a dsge model with...

This comment deals with Lipietz's presentation of a solution which had been proposed to the transformation problem. Lipietz's account can be criticized in two respects. First, his attempt to integrate the familiar Morishima-type approach with the newer one is based on a confusion between the...

In recent years, central banks and international organisations have been making ever greater use of factor models to forecast macroeconomic variables. We examine the performance of these models in forecasting French GDP growth over short horizons. The factors are extracted from a large data set...

There have been increasing warnings lately that the world economy is in danger of disintegrating. How realistic are such fears? Could the world's trading partners have a serious interest in such a development and be prepared to accept the risks involved? The following three articles seek to...