The provision of liquidity by international institutions such as the IMF to countries experiencing balance of payment problems could prevent liquidity runs but could also cause moral hazard distortions: expecting to be bailed out by the IMF, debtor countries would have weak incentives to...

We analyse the arguments in favour and against binding fiscal rules such as those recently agreed by European countries as preconditions for participation in the third phase of the European Monetary Union. The evidence in the paper suggests that a number of EC countries are following...

Most interpretations of the Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis of 1992/3 ignore the key role played by structural policy spillovers among European countries, and overlook the effects of coordination (or lack thereof) of monetary and exchange rate policies among the countries making up the periphery...

The paper analyses the modalities and consequences of a breakdown of cooperation between the monetary authorities of inflation-prone periphery countries that use an exchange rate peg as an anti-inflationary device, when the centre is hit by an aggregate demand shock. Cooperation in the periphery...

The Finnish fiscal balances severely deteriorated during the deep recession of the early 1990s with large fiscal deficits and significant increases in the public debt to GDP ratio. On the external side, current account deficits led to a large accumulation of external debt. While part of the...

The paper explores the view that the Asian currency and financial crises in 1997 and 1998 reflected structural and policy distortions in the countries of the region, even though market overreaction and herding caused the plunge of exchange rates, asset prices and economic activity to be more...

This paper studies the mechanism of international transmission of exchange rate shocks within a 3-country Center-Periphery model, providing a choice-theoretic framework for the policy analysis and empirical assessment of competitive devaluations. If relative prices and terms of trade exhibit...

This paper discusses different empirical tests of public sector solvency and applies them to a sample of 18 OCED countries. Provided that the government solvency constraint need to be imposed, these tests develop from the idea of verifying whether the intertemporal budget constraint of the...