This semiannual review finds that most of the major international currencies, including the US dollar, euro, Japanese yen, UK pound sterling, and Chinese renminbi, remain close to their fundamental equilibrium exchange rates (FEERs). The new estimates find this result despite numerous...

The latest estimates of fundamental equilibrium exchange rates (FEERs) in this semiannual series indicate that the currencies of the United States, the euro area, China, and Japan are approximately at their FEER levels and need no adjustment to reduce excessive external imbalances. The...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies--dubbed Abenomics--have been successful on some but not all fronts. The Japanese government must still pursue policies to increase economic growth. This PIIE Briefing, released on the heels of Prime Minister Abe's election victory in December, calls...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies--dubbed Abenomics--have been successful on some but not all fronts. The Japanese government must still pursue policies to increase economic growth. This PIIE Briefing, released on the heels of Prime Minister Abe's election victory in December, calls...

First came the financial and debt crisis in Greece, then government financing difficulties and rescue programs in Ireland in 2010 and Portugal in 2011. Before long, Italy and Spain were engulfed by financial contagion as well. Finally in 2012, the European Central Bank pledged to do "whatever it...

This paper applies time series analysis to distinguish between cyclical and demographic causes of the decline of the labor force participation rate. Some public discussions suggest that the decline of US unemployment from its 2009 peak of 10 percent to about 6 percent by mid-2014 grossly...

This paper applies the probabilistic debt sustainability model developed for the euro area in Cline (2012, 2014) to sovereign debt in the United States and Japan. The results indicate that to avoid further increases in the expected ratio of public debt to GDP over the next decade, average annual...

This study suggests that Asian emerging-market economies now have financial sectors relatively unlikely to provoke new financial crises, either because of reforms after the late-1990s East Asian financial crisis or because of the dominance of state-owned banks not subject to bank runs. Financial...

In this semiannual update of their estimates of fundamental equilibrium exchange rates (FEERs), William R. Cline and John Williamson again find that the overvaluation of the dollar and undervaluation of the Chinese renminbi have become much more modest than in previous years, as their current...

This paper sets forth a new methodology for obtaining a consistent set of exchange rate realignments needed to accomplish international adjustment in current account imbalances to reach fundamental equilibrium exchange rates (FEERs). The approach is named the symmetric matrix inversion method...