Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...

We use data on exchange rates and consumer price indices and the weighting matrix derived by Bayoumi, Lee and Jaewoo (2006) to calculate consumer price index-based REER. The main novelties of our database are that (1) it includes data for 178 countries - many more than in any other publicly...

Greece, Portugal and Spain face a serious risk of external solvency due to their close to minus 100 percent of GDP net negative international investment positions, which are largely composed of debt. The perceived inability of these countries to rebalance their external positions is a major root...

This paper studies a particular aspect of the choice of exchange rate regime by EU candidate countries in the run-up to membership of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The fact that these countries have adopted various exchange rate systems reflects a divergence of opinion on the...

We demonstrate that short-run real exchange effective rate changes are dominated by nominal effective exchange rate changes, while inflation rates are sticky and contribute little to short-run real exchange rate changes. These observations allow a rather accurate real-time approximation of the...