We analyze wage developments in the East German transition process both at the macro and at the microeconomic level. At the macroeconomic level, we draw special attention to the important distinction between product and consumption wages, describe the development of various wage measures, labor...

In this paper, a short survey is given on the contents and some problems of the theory of optimal currency areas. In addition, a new criterion for the assessment of the optimality of a currency area is proposed: the ability of member states of a monetary union to adjust their economic system to...

This paper studies the life-cycle dynamics of exporters and multinational enterprises (MNEs). We present a dynamic model of trade and MNE activity in which the mode of serving a market depends on the well-known proximity-concentration tradeoff. We show that the option of performing MNE...

Latin America's lost decade seems to be definitely over. During the first half of the 1990's, GDP growth was higher than during the 1980's as a whole, at the same time than inflation was substantially reduced and poverty indicators progressively improved. These common trend tend to hide,...