This paper places current efforts at international economic policy coordination in historical perspective. It argues that successful cooperation is most likely in four sets of circumstances. First, when it centers on technical issues. Second, when cooperation is institutionalized - when...

After a 30-year absence, calls for international coordination of macroeconomic policy are back. This time the issues go by names like currency wars, taper tantrums, and fiscal compacts. In traditional game theory terms, the existence of spillovers implies that countries are potentially better...

The paper reviews an event of 30 years ago from the perspective of today: a successful G-5 initiative to reverse what had been an overvalued dollar. The “Plaza Accord” is best viewed not as the precise product of the meeting on September 22, 1985, but as shorthand for a historic change in US...

The existing literature on international macroeconomic policy coordination makes the unrealistic assumption that policy-makers all know the true model, from which it follows in general that the Nash bargaining solution is superior to the Nash non-cooperative solution. But everything changes once...

This paper examines the international financial relations of the interwar period to see what light this experience sheds on current concerns over international policy coordination. The analysis proceeds in three parts. The first part considers the role for policy coordination as viewed by...

This paper makes use of the simulation results of 12 leading large international econometric models, as to the effects of commonly specified changes in monetary and fiscal policy, conducted under the Brookings exercise "Empirical Macroeconomics for Interdependent Economies." The first half of...

Holtham and Hughes Hallett, and a number of other authors, have suggested that a printout of all 1,000 cases of coordination considered in Frankel and Rockett (1988) should be made available. They wish to check whether, if coordination is restricted to policy packages that they call 'strong'...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...

Gravity-based cross-sectional evidence indicates that currency unions stimulate trade; cross-sectional evidence indicates that trade stimulates output. This paper estimates the effect that currency union has, via trade, on output per capita. We use economic and geographic data for over 200...

Countries' geographic characteristics have important effects on their trade, and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of their incomes. This paper therefore constructs measures of the geographic component of countries' trade and uses those measures to obtain instrumental variables...