English Abstract: FTAs have gained prominence in the trade policy of Latin American countries to the detriment of other forms of economic integration. In this trend there is a predominance of south-north schemes, where all kinds of asymmetries are evident. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate...

The Financial Crisis has hit particularly hard countries like Ireland or Spain. Procyclical fiscal policy has contributed to a boom-bust cycle that undermined fiscal positions and deepened current account deficits during the boom. We set up an RBC model of a small open economy, following Mendoza...

One question associated with the business cycle agenda of research is to evaluate if the business cycle of different countries may present similar features despite the differences in institutions, industrial structures, public policies and growth rates that those countries may have. Backus and...

This study aims to examine the theoretical literature concerning exchange-rate and balance-of-payments determination, in order to investigate how an exchange rate change may affect one country's foreign trade flows. Therefore, we analyze the different categories of balance-of-payments models -...

The real exchange rate (RER) can be considered one of the most important relative price of economics, given the influence it exerts on many other prices and variables, and may be overvalued, among other factors, as a symptom of the existence of a Dutch disease process. Thus, seeking to prove...

This paper shows estimates of the optimal level of foreign reserves for Brazil between the first quarter of 2004 and the third trimester of 2012, by applying the new Jeanne e Rancière (2011) framework, using different scenarios. The estimates of the optimal holdings of this asset are calculated...