We demonstrate that average interest rates in the EMU countries in 1990-98, with the exception of the period of exchange market turmoil in 1992-93, moved very closely with average output gaps and inflation as suggested by the Taylor rule

This paper estimates trend growth rates for a sample of industrial countries by applying Okun's law in first differences. Despite the simplicity of the approach and the restrictive assumptions, the method typically yields reasonable results when trend shifts in the Okun coefficients and changes...