The services sector is increasingly important for the euro area economy, but productivity growth in the sector has stalled over the past two decades. Remaining barriers to cross-border trade in services within the EU Single Market contribute to this weak performance. Our empirical analysis...

This paper outlines a simple three-country macroeconomic model designed to focus on the transmission of external shocks to Portugal. Building on the framework developed by Berg et al (2006), this model differentiates between shocks originating from both inside and outside the euro area, as well...

A hypothetical European Minimum Wage (MW) set at 60 percent of each country's median wage would reduce in-work poverty but have limited effects on overall poverty, as many poor households do not earn a wage near MW and higher unemployment, higher prices, and a loss of social insurance benefits...

The aim of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of risk sharing mechanisms in the euro area and whether a supranational fiscal risk sharing mechanism could insure countries against very severe downturns. Using an unbalanced panel of 15 euro area countries over the period 1979-2010, the...

We study how household concerns about their future financial situation may affect the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a representative survey of UK households to compute the MPC from a hypothetical transfer of pound 500. We find that household...

It has been well-established in the literature that portfolio inflows appreciate the real effective exchange rate. However, the literature lacks a systematic empirical analysis of the impact of portfolio inflows by institutional sector or borrower type. This paper fills this gap by exploring the...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs. We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. We find that tariff increases lead, in the medium term, to economically and statistically significant declines...

This paper investigates the impact of workers’ remittances on equilibrium real exchange rates (ERER) in recipient economies. Using a small open economy model, it shows that standard ""Dutch Disease"" results of appreciation are substantially weakened or even overturned depending on: degree of...

We develop a simple macroeconomic model that assesses the effects of higher foreign aid on output growth and other macroeconomic variables, including the real exchange rate. The model is easily tractable and requires estimation of only a few basic parameters. It takes into account the impact of...

This paper surveys the economic literature on the scaling-up of aid to Africa. It provides a checklist of issues that need to be considered when preparing a long term macroeconomic projection for a country involving the assumption of a significant increase in aid. Such scaling-up scenarios are...