This paper provides new evidence on the existence and magnitude of the 'twin deficits' in developing economies. It finds that a one percent of GDP unanticipated increase in the government budget balance improves, on average, the current account balance by 0.8 percentage point of GDP. This effect...

The effectiveness of recent fiscal stimulus packages significantly depends on the assumption of non-Ricardian savings behavior. We show that, under the same assumption, fiscal deficits can have worrisome implications if they turn out to be permanent. First, if they occur in large countries they...

This paper uses a Ricardian framework to clarify the role of microeconomic and macroeconomic factors governing the time series and cross-section behavior of sectoral trade balances. Unit labor costs and trade balances are calculated for several sectors for the seven major industrial countries....

A view receiving increased support is that the height of trade costs in prime export sectors has a strong effect on current account balances: countries specializing in sectors that face relatively high trade costs, such as services, tend to run current account deficits, and similarly, countries...

We build a factor-augmented interacted panel vector-autoregressive model of the Euro Area (EA) and estimate it with Bayesian methods to compute government spending multipliers. The multipliers are contingent on the overall monetary policy stance, captured by a shadow monetary policy rate. In the...

This paper studies large reductions in current account deficits and exchange rate depreciations in low- and middle-income countries. It examines which factors help predict the occurrence of a reversal or a currency crisis, and how these events affect macroeconomic performance. Both domestic...

This paper analyzes the behavior of current account deficits in Africa and estimates whether the deficits are excessive with respect to fundamentals. The findings are the deficits are (i) not very persistent; (ii) positively linked with domestic growth; (iii) strongly linked with public (and...

This paper presents an econometric model of U.S. current account transactions. The model is used to analyze the factors behind the deterioration in the U.S. external position during the 1980s and to examine the sensitivity of the U.S. current account balance to changes in factors which are its...

We estimate consumption dynamics in the G-7 economies, paying particular attention to the possibility of precautionary behavior in the face of uncertainty. We find that in the short run, continued income uncertainty will significantly dampen consumption growth. As such, consumption in the G-7...