This paper studies various approaches to the equilibrium real effective exchange rate estimation, including structural and direct estimation approaches. It shows their strengths and weaknesses with application to the case of Latvia. Despite the approaches differing considerably in terms of their...

This study estimates cyclically adjusted balances of Latvia's general government consolidated budget using methodologies of the ESCB and OECD and assesses the consistency of the implemented fiscal policy with the EU fiscal policy framework. During the period of rapid economic growth the Latvian...

This study is devoted to examing marginal effects of traditional determinants of exports and imports with a focus on the role of price competitiveness in restoring external balances. It is a first attempt to compare marginal effects of various harmonised competitiveness indicators (HCIs) on both...

This study presents an approach based on a perturbation technique to construct global solutions to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGE). The main idea is to expand a solution in a series of powers of a small parameter scaling the uncertainty in the economy around a solution to...

This paper presents a method to construct a sequence of approximate policy functions of increasing accuracy on non-local domains. The method is based upon the notion of stable manifold originated from dynamical systems theory. The approximate policy functions are constructed employing the...

The severe repercussions of the latest financial crisis highlighted the crucial role of the financial sector in the propagation of economic and financial shocks. In this paper we analyse the role of financial market frictions in business cycle fluctuations and in the transmission of monetary...

The paper is a generalisation of L. E. O. Svensson's simplest test of target zone credibility and the drift-adjustment method in the context of anticipated planned repegging. In 1994, the Latvian lats was pegged to the SDR basket of currencies but on 30 December 2004 the lats was pegged to the...

We propose an export price indicator adjusted for non-price factors as a measure of a country's competitiveness. Based on the approach by Broda and Weinstein (2006) who adjust price developments for changes in varieties of imported products, we relax their assumption of unchanged quality over...

We propose a comprehensive analysis of a country's price and non-price competitiveness that accounts for changes in the value added content of trade by combining two datasets – highly disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade and internationally integrated supply and use tables from the WIOD....