Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...

This paper analyzes the synchronization of business cycles between new and old EU members using various measures. The main findings are that Hungary, Poland and Slovenia have achieved high degree of synchronization for GDP, industry and exports, but not for consumption and services. The other...

We study the transmission of monetary policy to macroeconomic variables with structural time-varying coefficient vector autoregressions in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, in comparison with that in the euro area. These three countries have experienced changes in monetary policy regimes...

The euro area is facing crisis, while the US is not, though the overall fiscal situation and outlook is better in the euro area than in the US, and though the US faces serious state-level fiscal crises. A higher level of fiscal federalism would strengthen the euro area, but is not inevitable....

The case for taxing financial transactions merely to raise more revenues from the financial sector is not particularly strong. Better alternatives to tax the financial sector are likely to be available. However, a tax on financial transactions could be justified in order to limit socially...

This paper describes the particular impacts of the financial and economic crisis on central and eastern European (CEE) countries, studies pro-cyclicality of fiscal policies, discusses the impact of the crisis on fiscal policy, and the policy response of various governments. After drawing some...

This paper studies inflation persistence with time-varying-coefficient autoregressions for twelve Central-European countries, in comparison with the US and the euro-area. Inflation persistence tends to be higher in times of high inflation. Since the oil price shocks, inflation persistence...

Using Monte Carlo methods, we compare the ability of the Kalman-filter, the Kalman-smoother and the flexible least squares (FLS) to uncover the parameters of an autoregression. We find that the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator performs much better that the time-varying coefficient methods...

This paper assesses the impact of the 2008-09 global financial and economic crisis on the medium-term growth prospects of the countries of central and eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which began an economic transition about two decades ago. We use cross-country growth regressions,...

The 'currency war', as it has become known, has three aspects: 1) the inflexible pegs of undervalued currencies; 2) recent attempts by floating exchange-rate countries to resist currency appreciation; 3) quantitative easing. Europe should primarily be concerned about the first issue, which...