This paper first reviews a number of stylised facts concerning OECD country business cycles over the past four decades. In general, the amplitude of business cycles has fallen, driven mainly by declining fluctuations of domestic demand. As a result, international divergencies of cyclical...

Using a panel of OECD countries, this study assesses the linkages between structural policies and macroeconomic stability. Business cycle and time-series characteristics of GDP and its components are employed to define various measures for economic instability and for the persistence of adverse...

Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) reversed....

This paper first reviews a number of stylised facts concerning OECD country business cycles over the past four decades. In general, the amplitude of business cycles has fallen, driven mainly by declining fluctuations of domestic demand. As a result, international divergencies of cyclical...

Switzerland has shown remarkable strength during past economic downturns. A comprehensive risk planning and monitoring system, as well as essential-goods stockpiles has effectively bridged temporary supply disruptions. Yet, rising geopolitical tensions and a global shift towards protectionism...

This paper considers the increase in current account imbalances in euro area countries since the early 1990s. While the euro area as a whole has remained relatively close to external balance, the current account balances of individual countries have diverged: Spain, Greece and Portugal ran large...

Some euro area countries accumulated large and persistent external imbalances during the upswing, revealing important weaknesses in the macroeconomic management of the monetary union. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain ran large current account deficits by historical standards, while Finland,...

The strong and sustained rise in oil prices observed in recent years poses a challenge to monetary policy and its ability to simultaneously achieve low inflation and stable output. Against this background, the paper studies monetary policy in a small open economy New Keynesian DSGE model...

Global external imbalances widened persistently over the last several years and have narrowed abruptly over the course of the financial crisis. Understanding the extent to which structural or cyclical factors may have driven these patterns is important to assess the likely evolution of global...

The paper employs a structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) along the lines of Blanchard and Quah (1989) and Clarida and Gali (1994) to identify the sources of changes in German international price competitiveness over the past 30 years. This leads to a separation of the driving forces of the...