In this policy brief, we review the problem of a lack of competitiveness and the policy options to improve competitiveness and hence promote economic growth. Inadequate competitiveness can be measured as a sustained current account deficit of the balance of payments. We discuss the advantages...

The way in which financial markets are framed depends on who is doing the framing, although there are reflexive interdependencies between these framings. Mainstream economics frames financial markets as archetypical competitive markets, focusing on prices as the key information on which to base...

This paper examines the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in Nepal using data during 2003-2012. Using the dynamic Arellano-Bond GMM estimation with annual data of 25 Nepalese commercial banks, this study tries to estimate the loan supply responses of Nepalese commercial banks,...

Despite major recent advance in the literature on financial crises, the key role of central banks in the dynamics of financial crises are still not well understood. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of financial crises by explicitly modeling the strategic options...

Financial integration challenges in ASEAN beyond 2015 can be grouped into two broad classes. The first classes of challenges are the regulatory and infrastructure challenges of financial market integration itself. The second pertains to monetary and fiscal policy regimes and how they are...

Apparently, it can happen here. On December 16, 2008, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), in an effort to fight what was shaping up to be the worst recession since 1937, reduced the federal funds rate to nearly zero.1 From then on, with all of its conventional ammunition spent, the Federal...

Unlike my distinguished fellow panelists, I am not the head of a central bank. So I take my marching orders from the conference organizers. In this case, they asked me to ruminate on the extent to which central banks’ independence and credibility have been affected by their actions during the...

This paper studies the effect of a monetary policy shock in the euro area on the main Estonian economic and financial variables between 2000 and 2012. Using a standard structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model we find strong and persistent effects on Estonian GDP, private consumption,...

In this paper, a Divisia monetary index measure of money is constructed for the Italian economy and its inflation forecasting potential is compared with that of its traditional simple sum counterpart. The powerful and flexible Artificial Intelligence technique of neural networks is used to allow...