From an international perspective, the European rate of unemployment has been relatively high and growing over the last one to two decades; on this background, the parallel rise in profit shares in a number of European countries seems to be at odds with expected economic behavior. The paper...

This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and central banks' interest rate setting behaviour in emerging market economies. Using a standard open economy reaction function, we test whether central banks in emerging economies react to changes in inflation, output gaps and the...

This paper aims to explain differences in inflation between six central European economies - Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia - and the euro area in terms of differences in productivity growth between tradable and non-tradable sectors. The coverage of tradable...