The focus is upon equilibrium real exchange rates, optimal external debt and their interaction, in a world where both the return on investment and the real rate of interest are stochastic variables. These theoretically based measures are applied empirically to answer the following questions:...

The main contributions of this paper are to introduce growth into a crisis framework and to derive the contingency plans for consumption and investment in a manner consistent with the stochastic nature of the state of the economy. The conclusion is that expected deviations from trend in the...