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...

We examine the extent to which developing countries that do little, if any research and development themselves benefit from R&D that is performed in the industrial countries. By trading with an industrial country that has large 'stocks of knowledge' from its cumulative R&D activities, a...

This paper reviews the management of the debt crisis to date, and considers several possible alternative approaches for international cooperation in the future. The first part of the paper briefly reviews the scope of the crisis, and some of the reasons for its onset. Then, the paper describe...

Based on a sample of 56 countries, we find that while fiscal policy in the G-7 countries appears to be broadly consistent with Barro's tax smoothing proposition, in developing countries government spending and taxes are highly procyclical (i.e., government spending rises and taxes fall during...

The problem of economic development,' as Lucas (1988) states it, is the problem of accounting for the observed diversity in levels and rates of growth of per capita income across countries and across time. We study conditions under which capital mobility and labor mobility (two seemingly...

Against a background of projections of sharply increasing elderly dependency rates, workers in the major industrial economies are apprehensive that their social security benefit entitlements will be cut before or after they retire, leaving them with inadequate retirement income. This paper looks...

This paper offers an explanation for the persistence observed in real exchange rate movements. The model combines pricing to market behavior with sticky prices generated by staggered contracts. A translog preference structure is sued to enhance both features. The paper finds that openness limits...

The israeli high tech sector is widely regarded as a hotbed of cutting-edge technologies, and as the growth engine of the israeli economy in the nineties and beyond. In this paper we present a close-up portrait of innovation in Israel for the past 30 years, with the aid of highly detailed patent...

This paper examines the evidence on technology diffusion through trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly research and development (R&D) investments, employing imported intermediates implies an implicit sharing of the technology that was...