The paper provides an introduction to essays published in this volume, which focus on nominal and real convergence in transition countries. The paper is based on the idea that the process of convergence can, to a large extent, be viewed via developments in real exchange rates. Key issues...

This paper surveys recent literature on real business cycles in open economies. It focuses on the empirical regularities of international macroeconomic fluctuations and provides a short discussion of the differences between the stylized facts of business cycles in advanced and in developing...

We consider two markets in our model: wholesale, where producers' supply interacts with distributors' demand, and retail with distributors' supply and consumers' demand. The wholesale market determines the producer price index (PPI), production and indirectly also employment. In the retail...

The Czech Economic Association, in co-operation with the Czech National Bank, organised a public seminar on ?The State of the Phillips Curve,? which featured a lecture by Professor Laurence Ball, in Prague in April 2001. Professor Ball, a professor of economics at John Hopkins University, began...

The exchange rate cannot significantly diverge from a (real) long-term equilibrium level consistent with the macroeconomic picture of an economy for a long period of time; otherwise, the economy suffers from macroeconomic imbalances such as below-potential growth and below natural employment, or...

The paper presents both theoretical and an empirical analysis of factors influencing the prices of non-tradable goods and services in the Czech economy. The analysis discusses the development of the real exchange rate of the Czech koruna and quantifies the size of the real exchange rate...

The paper analyses a relationship between monetary aggregate M2 and inflation in a small open economy. The relationship between monetary expansion and inflation as well as a dynamic of income velocity of money framework in a small open economy are discussed in more details in the paper. Authors...

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the process of price convergence (beta and sigma convergence) in new EU Member States towards the Euro area (EU-12). The theoretical part of the paper consists of a brief overview of methods that are employed for analyses of the process of price...

This paper begins with a description of simple select models of inflation and their ability to fit the data. The paper in turn measures the stability of particular parsimonious models. One-step forecast tests are applied, which establish the instability of the money demand model compared with...

There are three possible price movements in a market economy: stability, inflation, and deflation. Inflation and deflation are defined in this article as changes in the purchasing power of money caused by the money creation. Inflation and deflation have many asymmetric, and even some symmetric,...