Since the asset-price bubble burst in 1990, the Japanese government has repeatedly announced fiscal measures to boost the economy. The government claims that discretionary fiscal spending from fiscal year 1992 to 1996 (although there was no stimulus measure in 1996) amounted to more than 65...

For North Korea, product market integration would generate large welfare gains, sufficient to end the famine. Additional gains could be had through military demobilization. For the South, the impact of product market integration would be trivial, but the impact of factor market integration would...

Economic performance in Japan--the world's second largest economy, the largest in Asia, and the world's largest creditor country--is going from bad to worse. Growth has essentially been flat since 1992, and the economy is now shrinking at an annualized rate of more than 3 percent. The OECD...

Is sovereign borrowing so dierent from corporate debt that there is no need for bankruptcy- style procedures to protect debtors? With the waiver of immunity, sovereign debtors who already face severe disruption from short-term creditors grabbing their currency reserves are also exposed to...

It is ironic that Germany's next great change in monetary regime comes just after the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the currency reform, which gave the world the deutsche mark. Discussions of European monetary unification and the replacement of the DM with the euro take on a special...

Today the US and China are probably the world's two largest economies (Table 1). Relations between these two countries are crucial to the future development of the world economy. Unfortunately economic relations between the two countries are troubled. China is large, rapidly growing, and still...

Since 1990, a number of countries have adopted inflation targeting as their declared monetary strategy. Interpretations of the significance of this movement, however, have differed widely. To some, inflation targeting mandates the single-minded, rule-like pursuit of price stability without...

In this paper we use cross-entropy estimation techniques to construct the underlying data base for a computable general equilibrium model (CGE) of the North Korean economy, starting from incomplete data ridden with gross measurement errors. The cross-entropy estimation approach is powerful and...

In the wake of financial crises in Mexico (1994-95), Asia (1997-98), Russia (1998) and Brazil (1998-99), respected observers have questioned the benefits of wide-open international capital markets (Bhagwati, 1998; Krugman, 1998; Rodrik, 1998; Eichengreen, 1999). Our purpose is to identify true hazards and...

In this paper we examine three issues. The first is the path of China's nominal and real exchange rates since 1990. As it turns out, this is more complicated than is commonly assumed, with basic results exhibiting sensitivity to the exchange rate measure used. We conclude that while China did...