The European Commission’s Scoreboard of Macroeconomic Imbalances is a rare case of a publicly released early warning system (EWS). That allows for analyzing the preferences of the involved politicians with regard to the two potential errors of an EWS – missing a crisis and issuing a false...

The signals approach as an early warning system has been fairly successful in detecting crises, but it has so far failed to gain popularity in the scientific community because it does not distinguish between randomly achieved in-sample fit and true predictive power. To overcome this obstacle, we...

This paper evaluates the potential effects of the Basel II accord on preventing the transmission from currency crises to financial crises. By analyzing the case study of South Korea, it shows how mismatches on banks’ balance sheets were the primary cause for such a transmission, and models how...

In this paper we test the ability of three of the most popular methods to forecast the South African currency crisis of June 2006. In particular we are interested in the out-ofsample performance of these methods. Thus, we choose the latest crisis to conduct an out-of-sample experiment. In sum,...

Currency crises episodes of 1996, 1998, and 2001 are used to identify common country specific causes of currency crises in South Africa. The paper identifies crises by the use of an Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index as introduced by Eichengreen, Rose and Wyplosz (1996). It extends the Signals...

The paper explores the relationships between economic freedom on the one side and development aid and IMF credit as approximation for conditional aid on the other side. After a short review of current literature on the issue of economic development, economic freedom, aid, and IMF credit, the...

European authorities and scholars published proposals on which indicators of macroeconomic imbalances might be used to uncover risks for the sustainability of public debt in the European Union. We test the ability of four proposed sets of indicators to send early-warnings of debt crises using a...

The European Commission s Scoreboard of Macroeconomic Imbalances is a rare case of a publicly released early warning system. It allows the preferences of the politicians involved to be analysed with regard to the two potential errors of an early warning system missing a crisis and issuing a...

The paper combines the estimation of the Monetary Conditions Index (MCI) with the theoretic modelling of optimal monetary policy in South Africa. The idea that monetary policy is not only interested in optimal monetary conditions but also in external stability, provides the basis for the...

European authorities and scholars published proposals on which indicators of macroeconomic imbalances might be used to uncover risks for the sustainability of public debt in the European Union. We test the ability of four proposed sets of indicators to send early-warnings of debt crises using a...