We assess Finland’s competitiveness in the light of various, mainly short-term indicators. It turns out that the weak export market performance over the last few years is linked to the deterioration of profitability of production in Finland. A better export and employment performance requires...

This Economic Insight looks at commonly-used measures that are employed to compare the relative economic performance of Canada and the United States. It is based on research undertaken at Statistics Canada aimed at improving information about how and why Canadian and U.S. economic progress differs

The rapid growth of offshoring has sparked a contentious debate over its impact on the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has recorded steep employment declines yet strong output growth -- a fact reconciled by the notable gains in manufacturing productivity. We maintain, however, that the dramatic...

Real gross domestic product (GDP) fails to account for the trading gains and losses that result from changes in the terms of trade and in the real exchange rate (the price of tradables relative to the price of nontradables). Canada has enjoyed vast improvements in its terms of trade over recent...

The economic crisis in the early 1990s prompted action on reforming the Swedish welfare state and its institutions, including deregulation of a wide range of product markets. In that way, Sweden took early action compared to other OECD countries currently struggling with how to make public...

This paper aims at verifying if territorial dimension is an important element for the economic success of a state and, if so, why and through which channels. The work proceeds to a careful assessment of the factors that can influence the economy of small states, in particular insularity, being...

We study the existence of structural break in TFP and in several indicators of openness for a sample of 20 Latin American and Caribbean economies for the period 1960-2005. For this purpose, it has been used the test of Zivot and Andrews (1992) on series of TFP computed from a development...

This paper presents and describes a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of 10 categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Schindler (2009) and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

Purpose - The issue of which financial initial conditions are necessary to materialize the benefits of financial globalization remains open to debate in the literature. In this paper, we try to put some empirical structure on the concept of financial threshold conditions in order to give...

Purpose - The issue of which financial initial conditions are necessary to materialize the benefits of financial globalization remains open to debate in the literature. In this paper, we try to put some empirical structure on the concept of financial threshold conditions in order to give...