Rising income inequality is an anglo Saxon problem. For most of the other OECD countries, earnings dispersion is rather persistent. Vertical mobility is to be taken into account. The paper also looks at the relationship of income inequality, growth and employment. It elaborates the point that...

This paper provides an account of the evolution of poverty and inequality during adjustment in Bolivia, covering the period 1985?99. It turns out that urban poverty declined somewhat after the initial stabilization phase that followed the hyperinflation in 1985. A similar evolution of per capita...

This paper addresses poverty reduction strategies from a labour market perspective. Structural features and constraints are emphasised using informality as a descriptive and segmentation as an analytical concept. Divergent demand-side developments combined with limited labour market mobility...

Germany's social security system is surveyed, its benefits and contributions are discussed. The expansion of this system in the last decades is described, its impact on employment and growth is studied and proposals for the reform of the system are discussed.

The paper analyzes why Germany experiences the high and sticky unemployment. It looks at wage policy and proposes a new approach to measure productivity growth when unemployment increases. It studies the position of trade unions and the institutional set-up of the labor market. It looks at the...

Combining a Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (DCGE) model of the Yemeni economy with a microsimulation model that captures the link between changes in household incomes and changes in nutrition status, this paper provides a quantitative assessment of the agricultural, economy-wide, and...

This paper analyzes the factors underlying the weakness of the euro. For this purpose, the framework advocated by Clarida and Gali (1994) is used. Within this model, three structural shocks drive the dynamics of the endogenous variables: aggregate supply shocks, aggregate spending shocks, and...

Theoretical research on the determinants of business-cycle fluctuations implies that the degree of international financial integration can have important implications for the propagation of, e.g., macroeconomic policy shocks in an open economy. An important assumption underlying this research is...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium two-economy model in order to analyze the welfare effects of monetary policy in open economies. The model features two distortions: one distortion due to monopolistic competition, and one distortion due to a consumption externality. This consumption...

This paper uses a 'new open economy macroeconomics' model to study the effect of a productivity shock on exchange rate dynamics. The special features of the model are that households' preferences exhibit a 'catching up with the Joneses' effect and that international financial markets are...