The current framework for improving aid effectiveness, the ‘Paris’ agenda of harmonization and alignment, has been found lacking. Alternatives are needed. This paper highlights some examples of recent innovations in the management and delivery of development aid. Drawing upon Barder (2009)...

About five decades the Franc CFA - Zone in Western and Central Africa was praised as incarnation of economic and political stability in Africa, backed by France. But free convertibility and fixed parity, guaranteed by the French Treasury, mainly served the interest of a small elite of the...

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...

A comprehensive analysis of price and cost competitiveness warrants an assessment of a range of alternately deflated nominal effective exchange rates. Here, we focus solely on the price-competitiveness indicator currently published by the Bank of Italy (Felettigh et al., 2015), which is based on...

This paper provides new Bank of Italy indicators of price competitiveness for 62 countries. We refreshed the approach adopted by the Bank in the 1990s but later discontinued in 2005 due to the cumbersome statistical requirements in order to accommodate the significant extension of the original...

This paper investigates the dependence structure between the equity market and the foreign exchange market by using copulas. In particular, several copulas with different dependence structure are compared and used to directly model the underlying dependence structure. We find that there exists...

Long-term comovements of national stock markets in three EMS (European Monetary System) countries--France, Germany and Italy--are examined. The EMS stock markets are found to display long-term comovements governed by two common permanent components. To identify some interpretable sources of such...

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, after decades of trying to limit short-term international capital movements, advanced industrial states moved decisively in the direction of decontrol. What has driven this remarkable policy convergence? The answer lies not in ideological change or...

In this paper we first document the growing importance of intra-East Asian trade in parts and components and capital goods facilitated by foreign direct investment (FDI). Japanese direct investment has a stronger influence on intra-East Asian trade relative to FDI from France and Germany. It is...