This Selected Issues Paper on Belgium provides an overview of the extent of trade and financial openness of Belgium and the links to particular countries. With an export-to-GDP ratio of 79 percent, Belgium belongs to the most open economies in Europe and also globally. Its exports are highly...

The characteristics of the Belgian labor market are examined using international comparisons in order to assess the government’s recent labor market initiatives. The labor market in Belgium is found to suffer from a number of structural problems compared to other industrial countries: the...

This Selected Background Issues paper analyzes sectoral wage differentiation and labor cost issues in Belgium. The paper discusses wage dispersion across sectors in Belgium and compares it with the pattern in other European countries. It analyzes the data for the Organization for Economic...

This paper examines the potential contribution of unemployment hysteresis theories to the understanding of the Belgian labor market. It estimates models of wage determination using aggregate and firm-level panel data. Two main conclusions emerge: (i) the long-term unemployed do not exert a...

This paper examines the credibility of the exchange rate policy pursued by the Belgian monetary authorities of pegging the Belgian franc to a narrow fluctuation band around the deutsche mark, in the context of the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. Simple interest rate...

Interest rate differentials have been widely used to assess the degree of policy credibility. A problem with this measure, however, is that the relationship between the differential and credibility varies not only across maturities but also with the actual level of the exchange rate. The...