The paper discusses the trajectories of the Greek public deficit and sovereign debt over the last three decades and its connection to the political and economic environment of the same period. We pay special attention to the causality between the public and the foreign deficit. We argue that...

The US economy has been expanding moderately since the official end of the Great Recession in 2009. The budget deficit has been steadily decreasing, inflation has remained in check, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7 percent. The restrictive fiscal policy stance of the past three years...

This paper presents a discussion of the forces at play behind the economic fluctuations in the medium run and their relation with the short-run macroeconomic equilibrium. The business cycle is the result of two separate phenomena. On the one hand, there is the instability caused by the...

Employment in Greece is in free fall, with more than one million jobs lost since October 2008--a drop of more than 28 percent. In March, the "official" unemployment rate was 27.4 percent, the highest level seen in any industrialized country in the free world during the last 30 years. In this...

If the Congressional Budget Office's recent projections of government revenues and outlays come to pass, the United States will not grow fast enough to bring down the unemployment rate between now and 2016. The public sector deficit will decline from present levels, endangering the...

This policy note discusses the prospects for job creation in the US based on the most recent Levy Economics Institute Strategic Analysis report, Is the Link between Jobs and Output Broken? The results of our analysis confirm the continued weakness of the US economy in terms of job...

As this report goes to press, the official unemployment rate remains tragically elevated, compared even to rates at similar points in previous recoveries. The US economy seems once again to be in a "jobless recovery," though the unemployment rate has been steadily declining for years. At the...

In this report, we discuss alternative scenarios for restoring growth and increasing employment in the Greek economy, evaluating alternative policy options through our specially constructed macroeconometric model (LIMG). After reviewing recent events in 2013 that confirm our previous projections...

The United States entered the second week of a government shutdown on Monday, with no end to the deadlock in sight. The cost to the government of a similar shutdown in 1995-96 amounted to $2.1 billion in today's dollars. However, the cost and broader consequences of today's shutdown are not yet...

With the anti-austerity Syriza party continuing to lead in polls ahead of Greece's election on January 25, what is the outlook for restoring growth and increasing employment following six years of deep recession? Despite some timid signs of recovery, notably in the tourism sector, recent...