The global economic and financial crisis has sparked an unprecedentedly large, generalized fiscal policy response in practically all major industrial and emerging economies, which will change the fiscal and macroeconomic landscapes for some time to come. This paper offers an overview of the new...

This paper analyzed the impact of United States (US) monetary shocks on the economies of selected East Asian countries using a structural vector autoregression model. We found that the impacts of the US monetary shocks on domestic interest rates and exchange rates contradict conventional wisdom....

Previous surveys of Canadian and U.S. business owners suggest that access to financing in Canada may be more problematic than in the United States. Using the 2003 Survey of Small Business Financing in the United States and the 2004 Survey on Financing of Small and Medium Enterprises in Canada,...

The inflation targeting (IT) regime is 17 years old. With practice of IT now in more than 21 countries, there is enough evidence gathered to take stock of the IT experience. In this paper, we analyze the inflation record of IT central banks. We extend the work of Albagli and Schmidt-Hebbel...

This paper analyzes the differences in wage ratios of university graduates to less than university graduates, the education premium, in Canada and the United States from 1980 to 2000. Both countries experienced a similar increase in the fraction of university graduates and a similar increase in...

This paper examines data on urbanization. We review the most commonly used data sources, and highlight the difficulties inherent in defining and measuring the size of urban versus rural populations. We show that differences in the measurement of urban populations across countries and over time...

Unemployment in the European Union (EU) is a serious problem that threatens to disrupt the integration of accession countries, the character of individual countries, and the continued existence of the EU. European integration poses a huge conundrum for European employment because the...

The stability of the international financial system is in doubt. Analysis of the system has focused mainly on the sustainability of financing the American trade deficit and has failed to understand the microeconomics of transactions within the system. According to this brief by Thomas I. Palley,...

Drawing on the OECD's structural analysis (STAN) database, this paper contributes to the understanding of European economic growth through a decomposition into employment and productivity, across sectors, and across different time periods and countries. The US productivity surge from the...