There have been increasing warnings lately that the world economy is in danger of disintegrating. How realistic are such fears? Could the world's trading partners have a serious interest in such a development and be prepared to accept the risks involved? The following three articles seek to...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...

(From introduction). By many standards, economic and monetary union (EMU) is a major success. The transition to the new currency was remarkably smooth. The euro area has enjoyed remarkable price stability. After several years of disappointing economic performance between 2001 and 2005, growth...