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 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 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 co-integration of time series indicates the presence of their common trends. For analytical purpose it is important to transform some time series into gap form. This transformation can be received as a difference between the time series and the common trends. The model of demand for money in...

During 1930s and 1940s Josef Macek developed monetary theory leading to monetary policy recommendations which are deeply influenced by macroeconomic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Macek became leading Czech left-wing keynesian. His theory of money was nominalist and similarly to J. M. Keynes and...

New members of the EU will not form an optimum currency area with the present eurozone member states. The article discusses some costs and benefits of an early EMU entry for the Czech Republic (and other Central-European economies). The authors concentrate on the consequences of loss of...