Developments in trade finance in 2020 were largely driven by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve years after the great financial crisis of 2008-09, the issue of trade finance re-emerged as a matter of urgency. While the current pandemic-related crisis did not have a financial cause, one...

This paper employs a panel vector autoregressive model for the member countries of the Euro Area to explore the role of banks during the slump of the real economy that followed the financial crisis. In particular, we seek to quantify the macroeconomic effects of adverse loan supply shocks, which...

In our article we review the secular stagnation hypothesis, firstly postulated by Hansen (1939), to describe the current macroeconomic dynamics faced by developed economies. Based in the existing literature, we elaborate on a workable definition of secular stagnation founded on four pillars:...

This paper studies the performance of China's exports during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. It focuses on the speed at which China's exports were hit by this downturn. Product-country monthly exports data is utilized. It is found that GDP growth rates of importing countries play an important...

This paper estimates a nonlinear Threshold-VAR to investigate if a Keynesian liquidity trap due to a speculative motive was in place in the U.S. Great Depression and the recent Great Recession. We find clear evidence in favor of a breakdown of the liquidity effect after an unexpected increase in...

In response to the global crisis a number of new institutional measures have been introduced in the fiscal framework, both on the UE and on the member states’ level, and the question is: have these measures provided better fiscal sustainability outcomes? We approach this question by looking at...

Occasional crises have been shown to be part of growth enhancing mechanism (see Rancière, Tornell and Westermann, 2008). In this paper, we document that neither the stereotypical case study of India vs. Thailand, nor the benchmark growth-regression in this earlier research support this result...

Over the past 70 years, the number of international environmental agreements (IEAs) has increased substantially, highlighting their prominent role in environmental governance. This paper applies the toolkit of network analysis to identify the network properties of international environmental...

We examine the supply-side characteristics - unskilled labor, imported input intensity, dependence on inputs from China, production complexity - that determine different potential vulnerabilities of traded products to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on monthly exports at the product level by all...