This study applies parametric distance functions to estimate the efficiency of foreign banks in Australia, and subsequently employs extreme bounds analysis to establish the determinants of foreign bank efficiency that are robust to model specification. The limited global advantage hypothesis of...

This article describes how the quarterly output of the financial services sector is measured in the National Accounts. Then at a sub-sector level, an analysis of recent employment and output trends is presented to describe the impact of the current economic downturn on the activity of the...

Highlights relationships within component inventories data,between GDP and inventories and the relative importance of individual sectors' holdingsThere are a number of contrasting economic theories regarding companies’ motivations for holding inventories. One theory suggests firms use...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or the size of the economy, can be measured in three ways. These are the output, income and expenditure approaches. ONS routinely measures all three for the UK economy, but publishes a single 'coherent' estimate of GDP. This article explains the role of alignment...

SUMMARYThe household saving ratio summarises the income and expenditure positions of the household sector. This article considers developments in the ratio during the current recession, discussing the drivers in income and consumption and their interaction in the context of developments in the...

Methods explainedThe concept of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) originated in the UnitedStates in the 1930s where it was used to create a solution toproblems of water provision. The process arrived in the UK in the1960s for use in the transportation sector, where it was applied tothe construction of...

We test a simple model of exchange rate regime choice with data for non-OECD countries covering the period 1980-94. We find the variance of output at home and in potential target countries as well as the correlation between home and foreign real activity are powerful and robust predictors of...

The authors argue that in modelling cross-country growth models one should first identify so-called outlying observations. For the data set of Sali-i-Martin, they use the least median of squares (LMS) estimator to identify outliers. As LMS is not suited for inference, they then use reweighted...

This paper examines how the pass-through of monetary policy measures in 6 EMU countries has evolved over time and whether there is convergence in monetary transmission. The countries included are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and the sample period is 1980-2000. We...