Historically, the US Dollar had been accepted as the strongest currency and it had no competition at the regional or global level. But inception of Euro changed this unique stature and status enjoyed by USD. With introduction of Euro as the common currency, the European Union became USA's...

We use a general-equilibrium model to explain the rise in global trade and payments imbalances since the mid-1990s, and then to construct adjustment paths to a steady state. Assuming that the shocks giving rise to the imbalances do not suddenly reverse, simulated movements in the U.S. trade...

Since the dawn of the concept of nation-states, many nations have been planning their economies to increase people's prosperity and standard of living. All economies have a centralised feature where decisions are taken. But data collection and plan implementation has been cumbersome because of...

Purchasing managers' indices (PMIs) have found a place in global conjunctural analysis and quarterly GDP nowcasting, serving as reliable concurrent indicators of real economic activity. They also closely mirror changes in equity prices and corporate bond spreads. More surprisingly, PMIs react to...

Financial Times Series such as stock price and exchange rates are, often, non-linear and non-stationary. Use of decomposition models has been found to improve the accuracy of predictive models. The paper proposes a hybrid approach integrating the advantages of both decomposition model (namely,...

Section I of this chapter briefly reviews the literature on medical spending, which suggests that health expenditures began small but steadily increased throughout history (from 1 percent to 4 percent of GDP), then began to increase rapidly among wealthier developed countries after 1950. Section...

In this paper, we discuss the relationship between the current account rebalancing in the Eurozone, income distribution and wage policies with a focus on the main surplus economy, Germany. We will illustrate how and to which extent German wage policies could be able to contribute to a more...

This draft is a summary of the paper entitled: Forecasting Fuel Prices with the Chilean Exchange Rate. In that paper we show that the Chilean exchange rate has the ability to predict the returns of oil prices and of three additional oil-related products: gasoline, propane and heating oil. The...