The rapid growth of barter is one of the most surprising phenomena in Russia: As a percentage of industrial sales it steadily increased from 5% in 1992 to nearly 55% in 1998. Unknown in CEEC's transition countries, barter is only one aspect of the Russian economy's demonetisation [process, along...

The purpose of this paper is to examine effects of Brazilian "Plano Real" on credit during the initial years of implementation, and the profile of the borrower during this period. After the adoption of the Plano Real, there was an increase in the duration of contracts, from a maximum of 3 months...

Employment creation has dropped off the direct agenda of most central banks. The so-called “global best practice” approach to central banking has not focused on economic growth or employment generation but rather on keeping inflation in the low single digits. However, the policy record shows...

The history of Europe is riddled with conflict and disagreement between its nations and the present has not managed to erase their traces. The establishment of the European Union, although started as an economic project (EEC), has gained some other dimensions as well: monetary, political and...

A model of dynamic risk-sharing is constructed where agents meet pairwise and at random, and there is private information about endowments. Risk sharing is accomplished through dynamic contracts involving credit transactions, and through monetary exchange. A Friedman rule is optimal, and...

The Bank of Canada has announced that its inflation-targeting regime, in place since 1991, is at last to get a thorough review. The Issues needing examination include whether to move to a "price stability" program, which might be both feasible and desirable.

This study aims to analyze Turkey and the EMU countries in the light of criteria suggested by the optimum currency areas (OCA) theory and the Maastricht criteria. To this end, we follow a novel approach with an application of fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering. The results show that the application...

Against the background of the euro-sceptic view many German economists expressed during the 1990ies and the traditional as well as modern debate on the optimum currency area the outcomes of the first ten years of the European Monetary Union are analysed. It is checked to what extent the concerns...

Financial contagion and Suden Stops of capital inflows experienced in emerging-markets crises may originate in an explosive mix of lack of policy credibility and world capital market imperfections that afflict emerging economies with national currencies. Hence, this paper argues that abandoning...

This paper reviews the nature of the independence granted to central banks in Latin America after the reform adopted during the first half of the 1990s, quantifies the degree of their legal independence, and ascertains if there has been a negative correlation between legal central bank...