A generally used term for easy marketable commodities usually with high prices is cash crops As a result of it these commodities are produced by many developing and especially least developed countries (LDC). These crops have witnessed fluctuation in prices during the last decade. We can suppose...

While water supply sources are dwindling in South Africa, the demand for the scarce water resource is increasing. This situation requires a switch from supply to demand management of water in the country. The study updates the 1999 social accounting matrix for South Africa, using the Trade and...

This paper examines whether the term structure of interest rates provides predictive power for real output growth using quarterly time series data from 1980:1 to 2002:2. The empirical results are consistent with previous studies undertaken for France, Germany and the UK as well as earlier...

We propose a model to compute short-term forecasts of the Euro area GDP growth in real-time. To allow for forecast evaluation, we construct a real-time data set that changes for each vintage date and includes the exact information that was available at the time of each forecast. In this context,...

One of the most extended empirical stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States is the positive autocorrelation of output growth. This paper shows that the positive autocorrelation can be better captured by shifts between business cycle states rather than by the standard view of...

This paper examines the contribution of investments in Information Technology (IT) and in advertising to the output and profits of Spanish banks, in the period 1983-2003. We find that the growth in the stock of IT capital explains one third of output growth of banks, and that an additional...

Incluye bibliografía ; We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non-linear multivariate specifi...

Incluye bibliografía ; We examine the finite-sample performance of small versus large scale dynamic factor models. Our Monte Carlo analysis reveals that small scale factor models out-perform large scale models in factor estimation and forecasting for high levels of cross-correlation across the...

Incluye bibliografía ; We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specifi cities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefi ts of this...

We develop a dynamic factor model to compute short term forecasts of the Spanish GDP growth in real time. With this model, we compute a business cycle index which works well as an indicator of the business cycle conditions in Spain. To examine its real time forecasting accuracy, we use real-time...