The new member countries of the European Union professed on the day of their entry to adopt the single European currency Euro without undue delays. There arise two quite fundamental questions within this context, which are: “When will they make this step?” and “Will they be able, in this...

In spite of the fact that the Czech Republic, on its entry into the European Union, undertook, within the shortest possible time limit, to meet all the terms and conditions which are required for adoption of the common European currency, the Euro, it is apparent at the present time that the...

The declared objective of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to promote free trade between member states. Nonetheless, an exhaustive study of bilateral merchandise trade based on a large panel data set led Rose (2004) to conclude that...

Using a recursive vector autoregression (VAR), this paper considers the relation between the U.S. real interest rate and the real oil price. Theoretically, as outlined in Hotelling (1931) and Working (1949), a lower real interest rate results in reduced production and increased storage, implying...

Using a multi-country general equilibrium model, we demonstrate that when agents face credit constraints in an international financial market, rational expectations, which are ex-post heterogeneous between countries, cause business fluctuations. If the international financial market becomes...

Modelling of the physical characteristics of goods and geography can explain both the puzzling persistence and volatility in the deviations of the international relative prices and the real exchange rate (the PPP persistence puzzle). In a two-country, three-good general equilibrium model,...

Following extensive economic and market reforms and more than a decade of negotiations, Vietnam became the latest country to accede to the World Trade Organization in November 2006. While it is expected that greater liberalisation will boost Vietnam’s economic growth and contribute to the...

We argue that the specifications used to estimate the permanent growth effects of reforms in the financial sector are unsatisfactory. Using a modified specification and data for the period 1970 to 2004, we show developments in the financial sector in Malaysia have a small but significant...

This paper reviews the central features of France’s capital controls in the 70's and 80's and strives to assess their ability, in the context of various exchange rate mechanisms, to regulate capital flows and to stabilize the exchange rate while allowing France to preserve a measure of...