This lecture is a tour d’horizon of the financial crisis aimed at extracting lessons for future financial regulation. It combines normative recommendations based on conventional welfare economics with positive assessments of the kind of measures likely to be adopted based on political economy...

The paper considers three methods for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and thus for restoring symmetry to domain over which the central bank can vary its policy rate. They are: (1) abolishing currency (which would also be a useful crime-fighting measure); (2) paying...

In this paper we examine the main challenges in promoting an effective market economy. While the paper ranges widely across the spectrum of economic institutions and policies, the central theme is the importance of macroeconomic stability for economic growth in the medium and long run....

This paper contains a selective review of some of the key fiscal issues faced by transition economies. The twelve countries that provide the empirical background for this study have all been under Fund programs for at least some of the time since they initiated their transitions from plan to...

This paper analyses the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence linking enterprise performance in transition economies to the macroeconomic environment. Macroeconomic instability is traced to the unsustainability of the fiscal-financial and monetary programmes of the state and to regulatory...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...