This paper demonstrates that the current economic crisis has its roots in the evolution of the global economy during the 1960s. The gradual increase of US debt from the 1960s accompanied by the deficit in the US trade balance due to international competition from EU, Japan, and later from China...

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was created to help to improve the economic well being of the people in the member countries. NAFTA did improve the trade balance and foreign direct investment of Mexico. NAFTA also improved the trade balance and employment rate in Canada. However, the...

Purpose – Impact of currency depreciation or devaluation on the trade balance is not instantaneous. Indeed, because of adjustment lags favorable effects of depreciation is only realized in the future. This short-run dynamics of the trade balance is summarized by the S-Curve phenomenon. The...

This paper examines the J-curve hypothesis for Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Applying the vector error correction model and the generalised impulse response function, this study finds that the trade balance reacts to real depreciation in several different patterns in the short run....

This paper investigates the sustainability of trade balances in the Sub-Saharan African regions, using both the panel unit root (IPS) test proposed by Im et al. (2003) and the cross-sectionally augmented version of the IPS (CIPS test) suggested by Pesaran (2007), where the former test is based...

Purpose – The Marshall-Lerner (M-L) condition, which stipulates that a devaluation or depreciation of its currency will improve a country's trade balance only if the sum of the absolute values of a country's import and export price elasticities are greater than one, is a fundamental tenet of...

The dispersion in current account balances among countries in the euro area has widened markedly over the past decade-and-a-half, and especially since 1999. We decompose current account positions for euro area countries into intra-euro-area balances and extra-euroarea balances and examine the...

Almost 73% of trade between Egypt and the USA involves the 36 industries for which continuous quarterly data are available over the period 1994I to 2007IV. We take advantage of this rich data set and test the J-curve hypothesis for each of the 36 industries. By relying upon a new definition of...

Purpose The Polish economy has undergone major challenges and changes over the past few decades. The country's trade flows, in particular, have become more firmly tied to the country's Western neighbors as they have grown in volume. This study examines Poland's trade balances in ten Standard...