While most Central European countries, realising the inflationary potential of money creation, had by the mid-1990s switched to market instruments based monetary policy, Belarus continued to use money emission, so gaining seigniorage and inflation tax. The productivity of the inflation tax can...

1. "Making Welfare Work: the Politics of Reform", by Frank Field 2. "EU Enlargement and the Future of the Welfare State", by Hans-Werner Sinn and 3. "Globalization and the Future of Social Protection", by Vito Tanzi.

A widely held notion is that freely floating exchange rates are excessively volatile when moving from fixed to floating exchange rates. We re-examine the data and conclude that the disparity between the fundamentals and exchange rate volatility is more apparent than real, especially when the...

This paper applies recently developed time series and heterogeneous panel nonlinear unit root tests to 24 OECD and 33 non-OECD countries’ consumption-income ratios over the period 1951–2003. This extends evidence provided in the recent literature to consider nonlinear adjustment in time...

EMU monetary policy targets aggregate Euro Area inflation. Concerns are growing that a focus on aggregate inflation may cause national inflation rates to diverge. While different explanations for diverging aggregate Euro Area inflation have been brought forward, the very impact of aggregation on...

This paper argues that the future of the Human Development Index published by the United Nations depends on how successfully this index becomes operational and this is more likely to be possible at the country level for a variety of reasons. With this in mind the paper proposes a method and a...

This paper investigates the micro mechanisms by which monetary policy affects and is transmitted through the U.S economy, by developing a unified, dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model that nests two classes of models. The first sticky prices and the second limited participation....

The paper examines the Porter and induced-innovation hypotheses in a firm model where: (i) the firm has a vintage capital technology with two complementary factors, energy and capital ; (ii) scrapping is endogenous; (iii) technological progress is energy-saving and endogenous through purposive...

We present empirical evidence on the forces driving real exchange rates in the longrun. Using data from three industrialised countries, we find support for the hypothesis that productivity and fiscalshocks matter. There is also evidence, however, that the impact of fiscal shocks only matters in...