This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix for Netherlands Antilles examines the economic growth in Small Island Economies. The paper finds that the Small Island Economies as a group grew faster than the rest of the world during 1960–85. The paper analyzes whether Small Island...

This Selected Issues paper on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) underlies key features of business cycles. To obtain new measures of classical and growth cycles, simple rules were applied to date turning points in the classical business cycle, and a recently developed frequency domain...

This Selected Issues paper first explains the recent increase in trend growth and then discusses how labor market and tax policies could best sustain it. This study calculates French trend growth estimating simultaneously a Cobb–Douglas production technology and total factor productivity....

The main purpose of this paper is to construct a financial conditions index (FCI) for South Africa. The analysis extracts the index by applying two alternative approaches (principal component analysis and Kalman filter), which identify an unobservable common factor from a group of external and...

The economic repercussions of September 11th are unique in that never before have economists needed to forecast and examine the impact of an event of such magnitude. This paper explains many of the economic effects of September l Ith, from the initial aftermath to recent developments. These...

It has been nearly 2 years since the UK government reformed the system of local business rates to introduce a uniform business rate (UBR), but the debate continues over the merits of the new system. The change across regions in the revenues raised by the uniform system of business rates...

Portfolio credit risk measurement is greatly affected by data constraints, especially when focusing on loans given to unlisted firms. Standard methodologies adopt convenient, but not necessarily properly specified parametric distributions or simply ignore the effects of macroeconomic shocks on...