We estimate a three-country model using 1995-2013 data for Germany, the Rest of the Euro Area (REA) and the Rest of the World (ROW) to analyze the determinants of Germany’s current account surplus after the launch of the Euro. The most important factors driving the German surplus were positive...

By focusing on the macroeconomic effects of temporary price shocks, this note clarifies the relationships among the terms of trade, the real exchange rate and the current account. This clarification suggests that a real depreciation might prove incapable of bringing the external imbalance back...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output ̶ the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first...

This paper develops variants of the model suggested by Glick and Rogoff (1996) and VAR models to analyze short term effects of the main determinants for the current account in Costa Rica. Empirical evidence suggests that, lagged investment, government’s primary surplus, terms of trade,...

One-sector inter-temporal models of the current account predict that a transitory shock to the terms of trade will lead to improvement in trade balance, while a persistent (or permanent) one could result in trade balance deterioration. This paper reexamines this issue in a two-sector small open...

This paper analyzes the relation between nominal exchange rate volatility and several macroeconomic variables, namely real per output growth, excess credit, foreign direct investment (FDI) and the current account balance, in the Central and Eastern European EU Member States. Using panel...

In recent years the US current account deficit has grown to the point that most observers consider its level to be already unsustainable. Yet it seems set to continue to increase in the foreseeable future, with net foreign debt likely to surge. This paper describes the present deficit from three...

This study tests for the stationarity and sustainability of current account deficits for ten transition economies. For this purpose, a new test is employed that allows one to test for unit roots in heterogeneous panel datasets. While the benefits from creating a panel to overcome low test power...

Current account imbalances and their sustainability are among the most debated international policy issues. Through the recently designed External Balance Assessment methodology (EBA), the IMF estimates the impact of several countries’ fundamentals and policies on their current account...

This paper makes a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the debate on what caused the "global imbalances". On the empirical side, I provide different types of evidence to support that housing demand shocks (shocks to the aggregate marginal rate of substitution between housing and...