Monetary and fiscal policy should be paired with the economic objectives on which they have the most influence. The authors have transformed this traditional Mundell's principle of effective market classification into the conditions of the Czech economy - a small open economy with controlled...

Moderate recovery of Czech economy in the first half of 2000 raises a question whether it is the beginning of a new era of economic growth or a mere cyclical motion. The balance of payments is the main obstacle of permanent economic growth; domestic savings should be increased substantially to...

This survey of the recent literature asks: how important is trade policy for poverty reduction? We consider the effects of openness on poverty in two components: the effect of openness on average income growth, and the effect on distribution for a given growth rate. Evidence from a variety of...

The real effective exchange rate of the dollar is close to its minimum level for the past 4decades (as of September 2008). At the same time, however, the U.S. trade and currentaccount deficits remain large and, absent a significant correction in coming years, wouldcontribute to a further...

This paper examines different explanations-initial conditions, openness to trade and FDI, and institutions-of the Mauritian growth experience since the mid-1970s. We show that arguments based on openness to trade and FDI are either misleading or incomplete, and the transmission mechanism...

Did real overvaluation contribute to the 1991 currency crisis in India? This paper seeks an answer by constructing the equilibrium real exchange rate, using an error correction model and a technique developed by Gonzalo and Granger (1995). The results are affirmative and the evidence indicates...

The paper describes three empirical models commonly used to conduct exchange rate assessments and applies them to data for Australia and New Zealand. The baseline results using data and mediumterm projections available as of October 2008, suggest that the Australian and New Zealand dollars were...

This paper analyzes the behavior of output during currency crises using a sample of 195 crisis episodes in 91 developing countries during 1970-98. It finds that more than two-fifths of the crises in the sample were expansionary, and that output contraction was greater in large and more developed...

Using the longest dataset publicly available (The Economist's index of industrial commodity prices), we analyze the behavior of real commodity prices over the period 1862-99, and have two main findings. First, while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of 1.3 percent per year...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between trade and total factor productivity (TFP) in South Africa. It uses (i) a time series approach where trade is defined in terms of aggregate outcomes, i.e., as the share of imports plus exports in GDP, and (ii) a cross sectional approach,...