After presenting the institutional construction during the pre-accession and post-accession to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the exchange rate mechanisms (ERM) in several countries and the convergence criteria, we go on with a brief analysis of the way the CEE countries cope with the...

The paper presents some results revealing the existence of the Balassa-Samuelson effect in Romania as well as some estimates of its impact on inflation, appreciation of the real exchange rate and rising competitiveness of the Romanian economy. * Study within the CEEX Programme Project No....

This paper investigates cross-sectoral productivity differentials in South African industry and their distributional consequences. The analysis shows that typically, traded sectors have experienced low productivity growth over the past decade, while skill intensive service sectors have had...

The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts. The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a...