Monetary policy affects activity, and ultimately inflation, in a number of ways. The most important of these is generally considered to be through the effect of interest rates directly on the demand for goods by households and firms. However, monetary policy can also influence activity through...

This paper reviews some of the difficult challenges facing debt managers in the years to come. In countries experiencing a rapidly diminishing gross debt, particularly the United States, this raises the issue of whether private-sector securities can serve as a substitute for the traditionally...

In a new and changing environment for monetary policy, an interesting issue to examine is the use of financial market indicators by monetary policy authorities. With this in mind, the OECD canvassed a number of major central banks to get their views. This paper presents a synthesis of the...

A successful reform of public enterprises would improve productivity in key sectors of the Greek economy, and thus provide essential inputs at lower cost to the economy as a whole. Reforms would need to address the factors that are responsible for the poor performance of Greek public...

Without further reforms, pay-as-you-go pension systems throughout most of continental Europe face unsustainable financial imbalances as their population ages. Though this paper describes the Greek pension system, which will face especially severe financial strains, it sheds light on the pension...

Poland's economy rebounded dramatically in 1992-93, several years after the nation embarded on a comprehensive program of economic transformation. This paper describes Polan's steps in the areas of public finance, monetary policy and financial sector reform, trade and exchange rate policy, and...

Government provision of a financial safety net for financial institutions has been a key element of the policy response to the current crisis, with governments extending existing guarantees and introducing new ones. These measures have been helpful in avoiding a further accelerated loss of...

The present paper studies dependencies between European stock markets when returns are unusually large, using daily data on stock market indices for Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Italy from 1973 to 2001. Dependency is measured by the conditional probability of an...

Government provision of a financial safety net for financial institutions has been a key element of the policy response to the current crisis, with governments extending existing guarantees and introducing new ones. These measures have been helpful in avoiding a further accelerated loss of...

This article investigates the relationship between a debtor country's external financial indicators and the costs associated with the insurance of export credits to that country. For this purpose a stylized model of export credit insurance (ECI) is developed, the central idea being that ECI is...