The slow progress and modest achievements of regional integration in South Asia have generated a huge amount of skepticism about its role as an effective strategy of growth. The present study, however, argues that there is need to forge deeper integration within the region. It examines the...

This document analyzes the patterns of fiscal and monetary policy in five economies of the Latin American Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) during four episodes of international crises: 1994, 1997-1999, 2001 and 2008. In contrast with earlier episodes when most...

We assess, through VAR evidence, the effects of monetary policy on banks' risk exposure and find the presence of a risk-taking channel. A model combining fragile banks prone to risk mis-incentives and credit constrained firms, whose collateral fluctuations generate a balance sheet channel, is...

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper...

This paper develops a two-block Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) to estimate the spillover of external shocks to the Maltese economy. The model focuses on five broad macroeconomic shocks hitting the euro area; an aggregate demand shock, two aggregate supply shocks which respectively proxy...