The failure of the Maastricht criteria delayed Estonia’s accession to the European Monetary Union (EMU) until January 2011. During this time, trading shares with Eurozone countries declined, raising questions about the optimal accession time. In this study, the macroeconomic effects of...

For more than two decades now, current-account imbalances are a crucial issue in the international policy debate as they threaten the stability of the world economy. More recently, the government debt crisis of the European Union shows that internal current account imbalances inside a currency...

Despite the fact that the last century was characterized by an impressive increase of cross-border capital flows, Japan remained a relatively closed economy up to the late 90s. Only when the "bubble" burst was the impetus given for more rapid opening up of the economy and the closely related...