This paper discusses central banking and the operation of monetary policy from a post-Keynesian perspective. It examines some current propositions concerning the conduct of monetary policy - such as inflation targets, contingent rules, and central bank independence - under the assumption that...

This paper tests the convergence hypothesis across the EU NUTS II regions between 1990 and 2001. It does that using the test of dispersion and estimating “Barro-type” regressions that relate economic growth to the initial income and other variables. It identifies the causes that can explain...

In Portugal, as in most other European Union (EU) countries, the challenge of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has worked as a mechanism for economic stabilisation. However, the political consensus on the participation in EMU did not develop with respect to the need for implementing structural...

In Portugal, as in most other European Union (EU) countries, the challenge of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has worked as a mechanism for economic stabilisation. However, the political consensus on the participation in EMU did not develop with respect to the need for implementing structural...

The increasing openness to international trade during the second half of the XXth century is an inescapable feature in the development of the Portuguese economy. Despite having been hit by several crises in its Balance of Payments over the century, Portugal did not suffer, apparently, from...

In this paper we investigate the real effects of fiscal policy in Brazil during the 1995-2008 period by estimating a VAR model that explicitly takes into consideration the role of public debt in the determination of fiscal variables, as recommended by Favero and Giavazzi (2007). According to our...

This study explains the intensity of redistributive policies of Latin American leftist governments during the so-called "left turn" in the region. Based on theoretical models that analyze the implications of inequality in democracies with different economic and institutional structures, it...

The vector autoregressive and structural vector autoregressive (VAR/SVAR) models are the cornerstone of the contemporaneous empirical macroeconomic research, in particular for measuring the impact of fiscal policy shocks. They may be employed as atheoretical models, as well as a mean to support...

So far, there are very few papers concerning the problems of non causality and non-fundamentalness in fiscal studies. This is even truer for Brazil. Non causality and non fundamentalness are econometric problems that are specially relevant in fiscal studies, as they are relate to fiscal...