We analyse the prospects for greater monetary integration in Africa, in the wake of EMU. We argue that the structural characteristics of African economies are quite different to the EMU members but that much can be gained from monetary cooperation, as external agency of restraint and in...

We document a striking empirical regularity: Latin American savings rates are as a rule substantially less procyclical than for OECD countries and in some cases are actually countercyclical. We build a non-representative agent inter-temporal macroeconomic model that rationalizes this phenomenon...

This paper develops an empirical model of bilateral exchange rate volatility. We conjecture that for developing economies, external financial liabilities have an important effect on desired bilateral exchange rate volatility, above and beyond the standard Optimal Currency Area (OCA) factors. By...

This paper reviews the roles of monetary and fiscal policies in macroeconmic stabilization. In particular, we take acount of interactions between the two policy instruments and ask whether the extent of macroeconomic and policy uncertainty has changed over time, especially with the advent of...

This paper discusses some key issues in the application of dynamic general equilibrium analysis to open economy modelling. In the context of the new open economy macroeconomics paradigm, we focus on: (i) the currency denomination of sticky prices; (ii) the role of the current account and net...

In this article, we study the determinants of cross-country variation in the level of international reserves over the period 1981–1995. Confirming intuition, trade openness is easily the most important variable. There is also some evidence that financial deepening is associated with an...

Three main features characterize the international financial integration of China and India. First, while only having a small global share of privately-held external assets and liabilities, these countries are large holders of official reserves. Second, their international balance sheets are...

In several countries temporary terms of trade improvements have led to a deterioration of the current account. Furthermore, many of these countries failed to attain greater post-boom growth rates. The point we make is that the structure of the fiscal process is critical in determining outcomes....

In this paper, we paint a statistical portrait of the determination of external debt for a set of low- and middle-income countries. The goal is to facilitate thinking about the role played by international capital flows in the development process. Empirically, we find that external debt is...

A major focus of the recent literature on the determination of optimal portfolios in open-economy macroeconomic models has been on the role of currency movements in determining portfolio returns that may hedge various macroeconomic shocks. However, there is little empirical evidence on the...