Pricing-to-market (PTM) behaviour implies that exporters adjust their prices to the prevailing prices in their export markets. For the importing country, PTM effects can be interpreted as a measure of the stability of domestic prices against foreign price and exchange rate developments. PTM...

A two-country sticky-price model is used to analyse the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy. The role of an u0091activistu0092 fiscal policy as a stabilisation tool is considered and a measure of the welfare gains from international fiscal policy cooperation is derived. It is found...

The presence of a lower bound of zero on nominal interest rates has important implications for the conduct of optimal monetary policy. Standard rational expectations models can have alternative steady states as well as non-unique laws of motion, i.e. there can be possible sunspot equilibria....

We use a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) analysis to explore the (spill-over) effects of fiscal policy shocks in Europe. To enhance comparability with the existing literature, we first analyse the effects of these shocks at the national level. Here, we employ identification based on Choleski...

Given the consolidation needs and the provisions of the new fiscal rule, budgetary planning in Germany has become more demanding. Fiscal projections are already difficult since the link between total tax revenue and economic activity is observed to be unstable. This Country Focus identifies...

This study focuses on the most important drivers of the swift current account rebalancing which is taking place in Estonia and considers the possible way forward. After very large deficits in the boom years (2005-2007), Estonia's current account balance turned positive in the downturn, as...

Romania's domestic demand boom over the past few years has led to rapidly widening current account deficits, reaching an estimated 13½% of GDP in 2008. High private sector dissaving has been exacerbated by a procycylical fiscal policy, with the public deficit likely to exceed 3% of GDP in 2008....

Measuring public sector efficiency is not generally straightforward and presents a difficult empirical issue, specifically in terms of adequate measurement of costs and outcomes. This Country Focus attempts to measure the efficiency of public spending in Malta by applying two alternative...