Today’s debates over the international flows of capital, goods, and services center around the puzzle of privilege—the possibility for some countries to enjoy “an excess return on assets relative to liabilities allowing them to sustain larger trade deficits in equilibrium”--- as...

In Australia, we debated the issue of sustainability of current account deficits extensively during the 1980s. A lot of the arguments that are being aired at the moment bear a striking similarity to the debate that occurred in Australia throughout the 1980s. Now, two decades on, by and large,...

In conventional models of the open economy, the impact on the trade balance of a change in the terms of trade depends upon whether the Marshall-Lerner condition on demand elasticities is satisfied. This paper shows that, in a model which incorporates rational savings behavior, the link between...

Despite the improvements in the overall U.S. trade balance in the latter half of the 1980s, the U.S. trade deficit with China has widened significantly. This article investigates the factors underlying this growing deficit and analyzes how growth in imports from China has affected the pattern of...

With the price of oil in world energy markets having nearly quadrupled over the last four years, it is little surprise that U.S. import prices have soared. One concern about these higher import prices relates to their implications for the U.S. trade balance, which turned to a deficit in 1992 and...

A narrowing of the U.S. current account deficit through exchange rate movements is likely to entail a substantial depreciation of the dollar. We assess how the adjustment is affected by the high degree of international financial integration, with exchange rate movements having a direct valuation...

Two country applications of equilibrium business cycle methodology have succeeded in matching some key features of international fluctuations. However, discrepancies between theory and data remain. This paper identifies an anomaly related to a basic property of typical models: The prediction of...

Remarks before the Little Rock Rotary Club, Little Rock, February 14, 2006 ; "If we create the conditions to let our private sector do what it does by its very nature--constantly adapt and reposition itself--then we have nothing to fear from competition from our trading partners, including those...