We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together the provision of certain public goods and policies because of spillovers. The countries are heterogeneous either in preferences and/or in economic fundamentals. The trade off between the benefits of coordination and the...

Financial integration generates macroeconomic spillovers that may require international monetary policy coordination. We show that individual central banks may set nominal interest rates too low or too high relative to the cooperative outcome. We identify three sufficient statistics that...

Most populist regimes in Latin American countries used trade policy to redistribute income, despite being less efficient than other redistribution schemes such as transfers financed with an income tax. Often, this outcome is attributed to the lack of fiscal capacity in Latin American countries....

This paper uncovers a fact that has not been well appreciated: tariffs in Latin America were far higher than anywhere else in the century before the Great Depression. This is a surprising fact given that this region has been said to have exploited globalization forces better than most during the...

This paper documents and evaluates the process of trade reforms in Latin America from the mid-1980s until 1993. It provides an analytical and historical discussion of the consequences of industrial policies in the region, from the early 1950s when import-substitution ideas were supported by the...

This paper analyzes the relationship between trade policy and economic performance. The paper is divided in two fundamental parts. The first one uses a cross country data set to investigate the relationship between trade policy and productivity growth. It is found that countries that are more...

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 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...

The paper examines international issues that arise in the design and evaluation of macroeconomic policy rules. It begins with a theoretical investigation of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country rational expectations model with staggered wage and price setting and with...

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...