External demand was the main driver of growth in Thailand in 2006 and 2007. However, WEO projections indicate moderating foreign demand in 2008, with U.S. growth being revised downwards to reflect the turmoil in housing and credit markets, and high oil prices. While the share of Thai exports to...

Upon entry into the European Union, countries become members of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with a derogation from adopting the euro as their currency (that is, each country joining the EU commits to replace its national currency with the euro, but can choose when to request...

We derive forecast confidence bands using a Global Projection Model covering the United States, the euro area, and Japan. In the model, the price of oil is a stochastic process, interest rates have a zero floor, and bank lending tightening affects the United States. To calculate confidence...

This is the fourth of a series of papers that are being written as part of a larger project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit to which economists have access for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In...

This paper outlines a simple approach for incorporating extraneous predictions into structural models. The method allows the forecaster to combine predictions derived from any source in a way that is consistent with the underlying structure of the model. The method is flexible enough that...

This paper reviews recent advances in the specification and estimation of Bayesian Vector Autoregressive models (BVARs). After describing the Bayesian principle of estimation, we first present the methodology originally developed by Litterman (1986) and Doan et al. (1984) and review alternative...