Many arguments that have been advanced in favor of maintaining capital controls within the EC have not paid sufficient attention to the welfare consequences of this type of market intervention. Our paper provides a simple, optimizing framework in which the welfare consequences of capital...

This paper analyzes the erosion of fiscal revenue by inflation resulting from the issuance of money. The empirical evidence for a number of developing countries supports the well-known hypothesis that an increase in inflation will result in a fall in real fiscal revenue because of collection...

To assess the feasibility of the national accounts treating as assets depletable resources extracted for sale, the paper examines three issues: 1. whether treating natural resources as assets when they are used requires symmetrical accounting when they enter economic reserves; 2. at what stage...

This paper analyzes issues for developing countries considering a move to capital account convertibility. It reviews the relevant literature, including arguments for sequencing, and analyses in a series of charts various features of the foreign exchange market impact of removing controls, as...

It is argued that taxation causes three kinds of deadweight losses and two types of direct costs. The deadweight losses arise from substitution, evasion, and avoidance activities while the direct costs are administrative and compliance costs. Some of these social costs tend to be discontinuous...

This paper argues that an important group of labor market policies are complementary in the sense that the effect of each policy is greater when implemented in conjunction with the other policies than in isolation. This may explain why the diverse, piecemeal labor market reforms in many European...

This paper notes that, for the first time, the concept and treatment of reinvested earnings in the Fund’s Balance of Payments Manual and the 1993 System of National Accounts are fully harmonized. The paper presents the conceptual basis for the measurement of reinvested earnings and...

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has a long-standing policy of controlling bank lending in Singapore dollars to nonresidents and to residents who use the funds outside Singapore. While the control may prevent the internationalization of the Singapore dollar and contain exchange rate...

Recent developments in financial economics have included many explorations into market microstructure, that is, the internal functioning of markets and the ways in which they provide liquidity to traders. An important contribution of this literature is that prices can deviate from their...

This paper examines the evolution of the relative price between tradable and nontradable goods in a group of European countries. A model of an open economy is used to analyze different factors that can account for an increase in the relative price of nontradable goods. These factors are: (a)...