Southeast Asia exhibits a bias towards intra-regional trade but not one that is out of line with the size, growth rates and geographical proximity of these countries; there is more trade bias than exhibited by the EU but less than that of NAFTA and, unlike in the EU and NAFTA, southeast Asian...

Evidence is presented in favour of a Fisher effect between treasury bill interest rates and inflation in Mexico between 1978-94. The two series appear to be cointegrated and a unit proportional relationship between them would appear to exist such that treasury bills rates respond fully to...

The Johansen procedure of cointegration is used to test the hypothesis of a stationary relationship between real money balances, real income, interest rates and real stock prices in Germany for the period 1960-89, and an error correction representation of the data is used to explain the...

The long-run tendency for government expenditure to grow relative to GNP, Wagner's law, is tested for six European countries using data from around the mid-19th century to 1913. With few exceptions the results suggest that: nominal and real GNP, nominal and real government expenditure, and...

This paper asks whether the adoption of fiscal responsibility laws (FRLs) has improved fiscal performance in nine emerging market economies, as measured by developments in their key fiscal balances. Examining these economies alone, their fiscal performance improved on average between the period...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of current progress in financial sector reform and outline some of the remaining challenges. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents an analytical survey of recent developments. Findings – The reform agenda is broad,...

The long-run money-inflation relation is re-examined in the context of De Grauwe and Polan's (2005) recent claim that the monetary aggregates are of no use for monetary analysis at low rates of inflation, and Nelson's (2002) counterclaim that in cross-country analysis money should be defined as...

In this article, we report results from several traditional and more recently developed unit root and cointegration tests, allowing for structural breaks, which indicate that UK government revenue and spending during 1750-2004 were I(1) series and cointegrated, and that the UK public finances...

A common criticism of foreign aid is that it reduces domestic tax effort. Empirical research on the issue has been hampered by the failure to tackle endogeneity issues effectively. We use measures of geographical and cultural distance to donor countries as instrumental variables to uncover the...

We use a bivariate probit model with sample selection to investigate the factors affecting financial exclusion of Bolivian households. We find evidence that for heads of households, being female and indigenous is likely to result in exclusion from formal credit mechanisms, though being employed...