Large budget deficits represent a burden on the future, and debt accumulation eventually poses great problems. Economists writing for the public can either highlight such truths, neglect the issue, or try to allay worries or excuse or justify large budget deficits (as anti-recession policy, for...

The new generation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models seems particularly suited for conducting scenario analysis. These models formalise the behaviour of economic agents on the basis of explicit micro-foundations. As a result, they appear less prone to the Lucas critique...

The paper offers a survey of recent research on fiscal policy in both deterministic and stochastic models of the New Open Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) initiated by Obstfeld and Rogoff (1995, 2002b). The survey includes a comparison of the implications of the deterministic benchmark model to the...

Measuring the effects of discretionary fiscal policy is both difficult and controversial, as some explicit or implicit identifying assumptions need to be made to isolate exogenous and unanticipated changes in taxes and government spending. Studies based on structural vector autoregressions...

This paper explores different fiscal stimuli within a business cycle model with an endogenous number of firms. We demonstrate that a changing number of firms is a crucial dimension for evaluating fiscal policy since it accelerates the impacts of fiscal policy. In the presence of demand stimuli...

Do public sector wages exert presures on private sector wages, or has private sector a leadership role in wage setting?. This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity,...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, ending into deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

We build and parameterize a general equilibrium OLG model for an open economy to study hours of work in three age groups, education of the young, and aggregate per capita growth. The composition of fiscal policy plays a crucial role. The government sets tax rates on labor, capital and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the economic crisis of 2008/2009 and the major impacts on developing nations and food-producing countries. Within this macro-environment of food chains, there is concern that food inflation might come back sooner than expected. The role of...

The paper looks at the growth and investment performance of six Asian countries - Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Thailand. Having discussed the time series properties of the public and private investment series and the GDP growth rate, the paper goes on to use the concept...