In a paper on the effects of the global financial crisis in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the author reacts to a paper of Aslund (2011) published in the same issue of "Eurasian Geography and Economics" on the influence of exchange rate policies on the region’s recovery. The author argues...

There are two possible responses to the Greek debt crisis: 'Plan A', continued official lending, for as long as needed, with possible voluntary private sector involvement, and 'Plan B', coercive pre-emptive or post-default restructuring with significant face value reduction in privately-held...

The euro area’s sovereign debt crisis continues though significant steps have been taken to resolve it. This paper proposes a comprehensive solution to the crisis based on three pillars: a plan to restore banking sector soundness in the whole euro area, a resolution of sovereign debt crisis -...

This paper assesses the impact of the 2008-09 global financial and economic crisis on the medium-term growth prospects of the countries of central and eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which began an economic transition about two decades ago. We use cross-country growth regressions,...

The 'currency war', as it has become known, has three aspects: 1) the inflexible pegs of undervalued currencies; 2) recent attempts by floating exchange-rate countries to resist currency appreciation; 3) quantitative easing. Europe should primarily be concerned about the first issue, which...

The global economic and financial crisis has raised further concerns about the euro-entry criteria, in addition to other factors, such as the effective tightening of the criteria due to the enlargement of the EU from 12 to 27 members, the highly unfavourable property of business cycle...

This paper studies the role of fiscal and monetary institutions in macroeconomic stability and budgetary control in central, eastern and south-eastern European countries (CESEE) in comparison with other OECD countries. CESEE countries tend to grow faster and have more volatile output than...

Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...

The puzzle of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) stems from the early eighties: the authors identified the correlation between a country's savings-to-GDP and investment-to-GDP ratio as a measure of international capital mobility. By using a cross-section analysis they concluded that the long-awaited...

The unemployment rates of then-communist Central European countries were unnaturally low because of manipulated data and latent, "intra-firm" unemployment. As the transition of these states is now more than two decades ago, the question of how the NAIRU evolved since then arises. Because of the...