The euro area is facing crisis, while the US is not, though the overall fiscal situation and outlook is better in the euro area than in the US, and though the US faces serious state-level fiscal crises. A higher level of fiscal federalism would strengthen the euro area, but is not inevitable....

Decomposing output into trend and cyclical components is an uncertain exercise and depends on the method applied. It is an especially dubious task for countries undergoing large structural changes, such as transition countries. Despite their deficiencies, however, univariate detrending methods...

Nowadays financial institutions due to regulation and internal motivations care more intensively on their risks. Besides previously dominating market and credit risk new trend is to handle operational risk systematically. Operational risk is the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed...

This paper shows that error correction models assuming that long-maturity forward rates are stationary outperform the random walk in out of sample forecasting at forecasting horizons mostly above one year, for US dollar exchange rates against nine industrial countries’ currencies, using the...

We use data on exchange rates and consumer price indices and the weighting matrix derived by Bayoumi, Lee and Jaewoo (2006) to calculate consumer price index-based REER. The main novelties of our database are that (1) it includes data for 178 countries –many more than in any other publicly...

Highlights 1) Iceland, Ireland and Latvia experienced similar developments before the crisis, such as sharp increases in banks’ balance sheets and the expansion of the construction sector. However the impact of the crisis was different: Latvia was hit harder than any other country in the...

Highlights 1) The European Union growth agenda has become even more pressing because growth is needed to support public and private sector deleveraging, reduce the fragility of the banking sector, counter the falling behind of southern European countries and prove that Europe is still a...

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 -...