In this speech, Willem H Buiter, member of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee, argues that the behavior in recent years of the world economy, led by the United States, can, in the opinion of a number of observers, only be understood by abandoning the old conventional wisdoms and adopting a...

In this paper we examine the main challenges in promoting an effective market economy. While the paper ranges widely across the spectrum of economic institutions and policies, the central theme is the importance of macroeconomic stability for economic growth in the medium and long run....

The paper considers the implications for the EU accession candidates of Central and Eastern Europe of the fiscal-financial constraints imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact and the Maastricht Treaty. Our findings apply also to those current EU members whose initial conditions (e.g.,...

The 15 newly independent states that emerged from the breakdown of the Soviet Union are now celebrating their 10th anniversary of independence. This paper looks back over the first decade and draws some lessons from the experience made to date. It focuses on the energy-rich states of the...

This paper explores some implications of the use of national currencies as international reserves. First, a closed economy overlapping-generations model is developed to derive time-consistent tax and inflation policies for a government that is financing a given stream of expenditures. Second,...

The paper studies the design of efficient anti-inflationary policies in a two-country interdependent economic system. A number of alternative specifications of the price formation process are considered, incorporating successively higher degrees of price level and inflation inertia.Only in the...

This note comments on two central issues for fiscal policy design in the UK, highlighted in the recent Code for Fiscal Stability' proposed by the new Labour government. The first concerns the merits of the so-called golden rule of public sector investment' -- the proposition that, over the...

This note again refutes Kuska's proposition that equality between the demand for and supply of money ("money market equilibrium") implies equilibriumin the balance of payments.Indeed, under a regime of fixed exchange rates it is precisely the balance of payments deficit or surplus that...

The paper extends the recent literature on collapsing managed exchange rate regimes by allowing explicitly for the qovernment budget constraint and the interest cost of servicing the public debt. The policy experivent that is analysed is the decision by a government to replenish its stock of...

The paper analyses a class of two-point boundary value problem for systems of linear differential equations with constant coefficients. The boundary conditions are expressed as linear restrictions on the state vector at an initial time and at a finite terminal time. This is applicable even if...