Requiring taxes to be paid in domestic money provides a legal tender basis for money demand and hence to the development of a financial system. In emerging markets, the level of taxation is a positive factor boosting financial development. At higher tax rates, however, taxation provides an...

Morocco has a distinguished reputation for opening the economy, privatization and for increasing the role of the private sector in economic development. The nation has also had well known success in achieving a high degree of price stability through a fixed and credible exchange rate that was...

This paper looks at interest rate developments in the US and argues that long-term real interest rates are at lows not seen in the past 50 years. It explores competing hypotheses that there is a global saving glut, there is conundrum or that global capital formation has slowed. The dominant view...

In Morocco, as elsewhere, banking is the principal financial sector it has the potential to contribute the most or to most severely retard economic development. But the banking industry's potential performance is constrained by the monetary policies of the central bank. This paper reviews some...

Recent academic and popular discussions of budget deficits rely upon a simplistic and, in large part, false conception of their effects. The recent literature ignores the fact that deficit effects depend on their source and on private sector responses to them. It also matters whether budget...

This paper describes the financial innovations hypothesis that M1, but not M2, has been significantly affected by the introduction and growth of these new assets. An alternative hypothesis, called the competitive markets hypothesis here, has implications that are nearly the opposite of the...

This paper examines the P-star model of the link between M2 and prices recently developed by Haliman, Porter and Small (1989, 1990) (HPS). It also develops an Ml-based variant of the P-star model. The analysis points out and corrects, for the most part, several major shortcomings in the P-star...

This paper examines several specification errors in the M2-based P* model and develops an M1-based estimate of this model. The apparent statistical significance of M2 is shown to arise from a spurious regression that uses a non-stationary regressor and because the significance test for M2 is...

This paper describes the evolution of Austrian exchange rate and monetary policy as an example of the benefits of policy coordination and credibility. This policy proved the performance of the Central Bank in achieving its twin objective of stabilizing the internal and external value of the...

Recent academic and popular discussions of budget deficits rely on a simplistic, and largely false, conception of the effects of deficits. The effects depend on the source of the deficit and on private-sector responses to it. Also important are whether budget changes arise passively through the...