Rising current account and merchandise trade imbalances marked the years before the global financial and economic crisis. These imbalances either contributed to or precipitated the crisis and to the extent that they create systemic risks, it is desirable that they be reduced. There are many...

This paper develops a long-run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the 'Dutch disease' and the 'resource curse', which primarily focuses on...

We examine whether the Chinese exchange rate is misaligned and how Chinese trade flows respond to the exchange rate and to economic activity. We find, first, that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), is substantially below the value predicted by estimates based upon a cross-country sample,...

We introduce financial frictions in a two sector model of international trade with heterogeneous agents. The level of specialization in the economy (economic development) depends on the quality of financial institutions. Underdeveloped financial markets prohibit an economy to specialize in...

This paper analyses the trade balance effects of Europe agreements (EA) between the EU-15 and four new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC-4) using both static and dynamic panel data approaches. Specifically, the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM, Blundell and Bond, 1998)...

In this paper we test the well-known hypothesis of Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000) that trade costs are the key to explaining the so-called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Using a gravity framework in an intertemporal context, we provide strong support for the hypothesis and we reconcile our results with...

This article presents a Ricardian model of trade with learning-by-doing to study the effect of barriers to trade in products with low growth potential on the long-run economic growth. The model shows that, when elasticity of demand for the product with a lower learning potential is lower than...

This paper analyses revisions of Swiss current account data, taking into account the actual data revision process and the implied types of revisions. In addition we investigate whether the first release of current account data can be improved upon by the use of survey results as gathered by the...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the performance of commodity-exporting countries in terms of macroeconomic stability and economic growth in a panel of up to 129 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main findings are threefold. First, we find that overall government...