Differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances. This paper argues that the process of capital liberalization can explain a substantial fraction of the US net external liabilities. We present a simple two-country model with an...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

The Pessimists and the Optimists disagree whether the US external deficits and the associated buildup of US net foreign liabilities are problems that require urgent attention. A warning signal should be that the debt ratio deviates significantly from the optimal ratio. The optimal debt ratio or...

Target-Kredite im Eurosystem – Die Stellungnahmen der Bundesbank – Was sind Target-Salden? – Kreditverlagerung – Zur ökonomischen Interpretation der Kreditverlagerung – Target-Kredite, Leistungsbilanz und Kapitalverkehr – Fünf vor zwölf – Target-Salden in den USA – Anhang:...

The paper discusses the seriousness of current account imbalances in the last few decades in Europe, with a particular focus on the European Monetary Union. A closer look at the development of current accounts in European economies suggests the existence of some serious structural problems that...

Die Europäische Währungsunion steckt in einer tiefen Zahlungsbilanzkrise. Insbesondere Griechenland, Irland, Portugal und Spanien wiesen in der Vergangenheit Leistungsbilanzdefizite auf, die sich bis März 2011 auf 314 Milliarden Euro akkumulierten. Dies entspricht dem Stand der aggregierten...

Using a new methodology that allows for nonlinearities, we find frequent support for sustainability in the debt of a set of Latin American countries. Our findings overturn results obtained with traditional unit-root tests and provide a more realistic alternative to evaluate the external solvency...

Differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances. This paper argues that the process of capital liberalization can explain a substantial fraction of the US net external liabilities. We present a simple two-country model with an...

The paper discusses the seriousness of current account imbalances in the last few decades in Europe, with a particular focus on the European Monetary Union. A closer look at the development of current accounts in European economies suggests the existence of some serious structural problems that...

In this paper, we first present the state and the development of the European capital and current account imbalances. We demonstrate how large the heterogeneity among European countries is and that clustering here different types of countries is possible, but that it leads to different groupings...