In recent years, Colombia has grown relatively rapidly, but it has been a biased growth. The energy sector (the 'locomotora minero-energetica,' to use the rhetorical expression of President Juan Manuel Santos) grew much faster than the rest of the economy, while the manufacturing sector...

I develop the implications for real exchange rate cycles of different policy preferences, focusing in particular on broadly stylized features of major Latin American and East Asian economies. Recent political science literature has emphasized the role of factors such as the influence of the...

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has recently received significant at- tention in academic and policy circles. Critics question the sustainability of MMT-prescribed approaches to fiscal and monetary policy, especially over extended periods of time, in the presence of international financial markets,...

This paper documents that cross-border investment income flows are important for explaining current account balances in major economies. Those investment incomes reflect returns on cross-border asset holdings and on balance often reach magnitudes around 5% of major economies' gross domestic...

Tests of the present-value model of the current account are frequently rejected by the data. Standard explanations rely on the "usual suspects" of nonseparable preferences, shocks to fiscal policy and the world real interest rate, and imperfect international capital mobility. The authors confirm...

Many developing countries have adopted investor-friendly policies in recent years in order to attract export-oriented foreign direct investment (FDI). The effects of these policies on the external accounts have been largely ignored. This paper endogenizes FDI in°ows in a structuralist general...

This paper develops tools to examine selected major issues in the Indian economy. The study computes the potential growth rate of the economy and the agricultural sector, extends the analysis of the fiscal stimulus and its effects, and estimates the short and long run elasticities of India's...

This paper presents a new measure of international gross capital flows and applies it to a global panel from 1970 to 2004. We explain why paying attention to the gross flows underlying net capital flows may be important and how our gross flow measure differs from the standard measure in the...

Successful economic development to a large extent derives from the mobilization of underemployed resources. Demand policy can play an important role. It is critical, however, to consider balance of payments constraints and to ensure an expansion of investment in the modern sector. A combination...

The paper sheds light on the apparent success of dollarization in Ecuador. The experience of Argentina with convertibility is used to anchor the analysis. Two key factors are seen to play the most important role: first, the behavior of the real exchange rate and second, the source of external...