The paper reviews the arguments for and against monetary union among the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council - the United Arab Emirates, the State of Bahrain, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Sultanate of Oman, the State of Qatar and the State of Kuwait. Both technical economic arguments...

The paper studies the effects of alternative financing policies in the open economy. There is a non-trivial role for financing policy because of the failure of first-order debt neutrality due to uncertain private lifetimes. Both the single-country case and the interdependent two-country case are...

The paper develops a two-country endogenous growth model to investigate possible causes for the existence and persistence of productivity growth differentials between nations, even though these countries show a common technology, constant returns to scale and perfect international capital...

Governments through the ages have appropriated real resources through the monopoly of the ‘coinage’. In modern fiat money economies, the monopoly of the issue of legal tender is generally assigned to an agency of the state, the Central Bank, which may have varying degrees of operational and...

We investigate how the ability of the government to depart from budget balance and issue debt expands the set of equilibria that can be supported using lump-sum tax-transfer instruments. We show how this depends on the restrictions that exist on the capacity to tax and make transfer payments,...

This paper surveys some recent developments in policy evaluation and design in continuous time linear rational expectations models. Much recent work in macroeconomics and open economy macroeconomics fits into this category. First the continuous time analogue of the discrete time solution method...

The paper uses a small analytical model of two regions, the United States and the Rest of the Industrial World, to analyze three topical issues concerning international economic interdependence and macroeconomic policy coordination. They are: (1) What should be the monetary and/or fiscal...

The paper considers the implications for the EU accession candidates of Central and Eastern Europe of the fiscal-financial constraints imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact and the Maastricht Treaty. Our findings apply also to those current EU members whose initial conditions (e.g....

The Paper considers alternative exchange rate regimes for the 10 East European accession candidates, both prior to EU accession and during the period following EU accession but prior to EMU membership. We conclude that from an economic point of view, EMU membership should be as early as...

This paper takes a systematic look at the portfolio choice problem faced by investment banks or funds investing in transition economies. We relate the performance of projects in the transition economies to the broader macroeconomic and international environment, which affect the project through...