In a recent article, with a strong theoretical argument but poor empirical support, military spending was identified to be a determinant of real exchange rate or a factor causing the PPP to deviate from equilibrium exchange rate. The poor empirical results were mostly due to a small number of...

Kuznets' inverted-U hypothesis implies that economic growth worsens income inequality first and improves it later at a higher stage of economic development. In addition to economic growth, other factors such as population growth, resource endowment, price instability, openness, currency...

Since introduction of unit roots, researchers have tried to solve the purchasing power parity (PPP) puzzle or its failure by testing for stationarity of the real exchange rates. Failure to support the PPP is mostly said to be due to low power of these tests. Panel unit root testing is more...

Previous research that has tested the stability of the reserve demand function uses panel data, without incorporating any adjustment process into the testing procedure when providing evidence of instability in reserve demand. In this article, we use time-series data, as well as a bounds testing...

Few studies in the literature have argued that inflationary effects of devaluation redistribute income from workers to producers. By using cross-sectional data from 24 countries, this paper provides an empirical support for the theoretical arguements that indeed, devaluations have unequalizing...

In this note we employ two procedures to determine whether the adjustment of international reserves is in real or nominal terms. Using panel data from 17 DCs and 16 LDCs, we show that adjustment of actual reserves to their desired level is indeed in nominal terms.

Due to intervention in the foreign exchange market, any pressure on the external account of a country could be absorbed either by a change in reserves or by a change in the exchange rate. In this paper we employ Girton and Roper's EMPM model to investigate the experience of G7 countries. The...

Unlike previous research that investigated the relation between exports and output, in this paper we assess the long-run relation between the degree of openness and economic growth. For the many countries considered here, we find a positive long-run relation between openness and economic growth.

Devaluation is said to redistribute income from the poor, who have a high Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) to the rich, who have a low MPC. Assuming the high MPC group to be unskilled labour and the low MPC group to be skilled labour, we investigate the impact of currency depreciation on...