This Selected Issues paper analyzes external shocks and business cycle fluctuations in Mexico. The paper examines the relative importance of U.S. demand shocks—and other foreign disturbances—in explaining Mexican output fluctuations. It identifies the dynamic response of...

This paper examines the relative importance of external shocks as sources of business cycle fluctuations in Mexico, and identifies the dynamic responses of domestic output to foreign disturbances. Using a VAR model with block exogeneity restrictions, it finds that U.S. shocks explain a large...

Recently, the export performance of France relative to its own past and relative to a major trading partner, Germany, deteriorated. That deterioration seems related to the geographical destination and product composition of trend exports. Faced with an increase in unit labor costs or in its...

This paper examines the changing nature of growth spillovers between developed economies, the North, and developing countries, the South, driven by the process of globalization?the phenomenon of rising international trade and financial flows. We use a comprehensive database of macroeconomic and...

In this paper, we consider the design of the surveillance, and, in particular, the fiscal criteria in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) with the view to ensuring they are consistent with internal and external sustainability. This consistency is important within a...

This paper investigates the impact of a global slowdown on individual African countries using a series of dynamic panel regressions for countries in the region, relating real growth in domestic output to world growth in trade weighted by partner countries and several control variables: oil...

This paper assesses the role of trade patterns in shaping the volatility of the effective exchange rate under two alternative peg regimes: a hard peg to a single currency and a peg to a basket of currencies. I link the changes in the nominal effective exchange rate of a pegged currency to the...

Shocks stemming from Brazil - the large neighbor in South America - have historically been a source of concern for policy-makers in other countries of the region. This paper studies the importance of Brazil’s influence on its neighboring economies, documenting trade linkages over the last...

Overall competitiveness of the Dutch economy seems adequate, but domestically produced exports have lost market share recently. Over the past three decades, globalization has greatly influenced economies as countries have become more integrated. Empirical studies on business cycles...

This paper uses a global input-output framework to quantify US and EU demand spillovers and the elasticity of world trade to GDP during the global recession of 2008-2009. We find that 20-30 percent of the decline in the US and EU demand was borne by foreign countries, with NAFTA, Emerging...