Humans act based on the ideas they adopt and apply to circumstance with the intensity of action derived from the associated emotions. It follows that in any society the presentation of the ideas to citizens a major driver of citizen opinion and hence a major driver of social development. After...

Mainstream macroeconomic theory understands the economy as a phenomenon tractable by analysis adequately enough to be manageable by macroeconomic policy guided by this analysis. We explore why this epistemological approach of the economy has remained dominant in mainstream economics despite...

We build a new Keynesian DSGE model consisting of two heterogeneous countries participating in a monetary union. We study how public debt consolidation in a country with high debt (like Italy) affects welfare in a country with solid public finances (like Germany). Our results show that debt...

The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations whose timing and composition - either tax- or spending-based - are uncertain. We find that the composition of the fiscal consolidation, its duration, the monetary policy stance, the level of government debt, and...

This research analyzes the regional price stability in Indonesia, post the implementation of the UU No.23, 1999 and UU No.22, 1999. The first relates to the task of Bank Indonesia to stabilize the Rupiah, while the latter is about the fiscal decentralization from the center to the regional...

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy. GDP per capita is now higher than in a number of OECD economies, while poverty and income inequality have...

In this paper, sound public finances under the euro means sustainability in the long term instead of short- and medium-term fiscal discipline. The challenges to sustainability are identified for the four largest euro area member states, and several policy options for sustainability are...

The conflicting standpoints on reforming the euro are creating more controversies than practical results. Mistrust between the participants led to short-sighted fiscal discipline that has amplified the economic disturbances. Expert analysis on the proposed reforms is often deficient as the...

We study optimal policy when the planner has partial information in a general setup where observed signals are endogenous to policy. In this context, signal extraction and policy have to be determined jointly. We derive a general non-standard first order condition of optimality from first...