The financial turmoil that hit Russia in August 1998, was extremely confusing to many foreign observers working in Russia. It was astonishing to see a country that seemed on its way to prosperity suddenly experiencing an economic meltdown. As part of my work, I was often asked to provide...

This paper explores the evolution of Swedish fiscal policy from one extreme approach to another one in less than four decades. After the demise of the Bretton Woods-system in the early 1970s, Swedish fiscal policy was based on a Keynesian approach with the goal to stabilize the business cycle...

Between 2000 and 2012, the Portuguese economy grew less than the United States during the Great Depression and less than Japan during its lost decade. This paper asks why this happened, with a particular focus on the slump between 2000 and 2007. It describes the main facts of Portugal's recent...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of interregional income disparities among 304 regions from 27 OECD countries between 1995 and 2005. This sample of regions allows to compare interregional income inequality in different economic integration systems: the USA (used as an example of...

Meeting of the convergence criteria adopted in the Maastricht Treaty allows to ensure the stability of the zone and to increase its position in the international arena. For this to happen, achieving of the required level of convergence must be long-term and based on sound evidence. Greece when...

Turkey featured a somewhat paradoxical evolution in income distribution between 1994 and 2005. During 1994-2002 (marked by the 2000-2001 financial crisis), growth was pro-poor in the sense that the income of the poor decreased less than the income of the well-off. Between 2002 and 2005, the...

The economic success story of the 1990s has been Ireland, with GDP per capita nearly doubling over the decade. In this article Pierre Fortin from the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research provides a detailed examination of the factors behind the...

In this paper we present stylized facts of the Greek economy that characterize the causes and the consequences of its ongoing crisis. Then, we offer an explanation that can account for those causes and consequences. This explanation is based on the view of Greek society as consisting of two...

In terms of macroeconomic performance, the Eurozone’s first decade is a story of successful inflation-targeting by the ECB for the common currency area as a whole combined with the persistence of real exchange rate and current account disequilibria at member country level. According to the...