The fiscal policy rule implicit in the Stability and Growth Pact, has been rationalised as a way to ensure that national fiscal policies remain sustainable within the EU, thereby endorsing the independence of the ECB. We empirically examine the sustainability of European fiscal policies over the...

The fiscal response in India to deal with the contagion from the global crisis during 2008-10 was driven by the need to arrest a major slowdown in economic growth. However, there could be medium-term risks to the future inflation path, in the absence of timely fiscal consolidation. As...

The common central bank of a monetary union tends to lead a more accommodative monetary policy in order to avoid the default of the moderately indebted member countries whereas the most hardly indebted countries have to default. The optimal inflation rate increases the more numerous are the...

With a two-country dynamic model in a monetary union with wealth private behaviors, we study the implications of public debt on monetary and fiscal policies. The model used has Keynesian features in the short run and Wicksellian ones in the long run. We analyse the effects of asymmetric fiscal...

The Maastricht convergence criteria of the Economic and Monetary Union of Europe stipulate that the public debt of a member country maybe at most 60 percent, and the fiscal deficit at most 3 percent of the GNP, which has led member governments to contract their expenditures. A simple two-country...

Why are some currency crises followed by economic contractions while others are not? This paper is an attempt at answering this query. In particular, we investigate two closely related questions. First, we explore whether there is a difference in the output effects of a devaluation during...

This paper presents empirical evidence that bank lending, and capital inflows can explain the severity of the Asian crisis of 1997 above and beyond macroeconomic fundamentals. We find that countries that share Japanese banks as their major lender with Thailand, the first victim in the Asian...

This paper proposes a new economy-wide framework for decomposing international interest differentials based on aggregate borrowing and lending behaviour in economies whose domestic capital markets are highly globally integrated. Using macroeconomic rather than microeconomic concepts, this...

This paper examines whether individual countries’ data show that FDI inflows facilitate capital flight and whether capital flight occurs due to poor domestic investment climate or is it due to discriminatory treatment against residents’ investment. Three capital flight measures are used....

This paper empirically addresses the question of the prospects of integration among African states in light of Mundell’s theory of optimum currency areas. The symmetry and asymmetry of shocks affecting African countries is measured by a structural vector autoregression decomposition method...