Services sector in India contributes more than 60% of the overall gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 40% of total trade. This sector also absorbs a chunk of manpower, especially in export-oriented industries and reduces the employment burden on other non-services sectors. In this...

The paper presents a comparative analysis of macroeconomic dynamics of 18 Arab countries based on a panel vector autogression estimation. Comparing growth performance, fiscal and current account developments in these countries, the study concludes that (1) in the short run, external and...

The paper investigates the growth effects of public capital in Portugal using annual data for the period 1965-95. Both a production function and a vector autoregressive model are estimated. Public capital is shown to be a significant long-term determinant of output growth. The size of the...

The purpose of this note is to contribute to modeling time series that may be characterized as integrated. In particular, a discussion about the use of standard distributions in regression models is included and some essential concepts are previously reviewed to this effect. The main objective...

Time series on economic activity in developing countries, in particular real GDP, are reported with important lags. Therefore, it is useful to construct indicators that coincide or lead the actual direction and level of economic activity. A general methodology to construct these indicators is...

This paper investigates whether Indonesia’s recent currency crisis was due to domestic fundamentals, common external shocks (“monsoons”), or contagion from neighboring countries. Markov-switching models attribute speculative pressure on Indonesia’s currency to domestic political and...

The paper examines the export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis for nine Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries in three-variable vector autoregressive and error correction models. When considering total exports, our results reject the ELG hypothesis in almost all of these countries. When we...