This paper examines credit origins of the business cycle in the former Czechoslovakia. Industrial production is found to be cointegrated with various measures of bank credit during 1976-90 and it is shown that noninvestment credits are Granger-causing industrial production and that a feedback...

From the early 1960s to the early 1980s, the officially recorded production of cocoa in Ghana declined by 60 percent. During the 1983-95 Economic Recovery Program, however, cocoa production doubled. Although these developments have inspired much empirical research, most of the studies have been...

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 was one of the most dramatic economic events of recent times, which raised many questions regarding the appropriate policy response to financial crises. This paper reviews the experience of this crisis, focusing on the overall strategy of crisis management...

This paper shows that during the 1990s, and before the 1998-2000 border war with Eritrea, the gender gap in education in. Eritrea has widened on the national level, and large regional disparities have persisted. The gender gap appears to be linked to lower female teacher participation and...

This article examines empirical evidence on the volatility and uncertainty of aid flows and their main policy implications. Aid is found to be more volatile than fiscal revenues - particularly in highly aid-dependent countries - and shortfalls in aid and domestic revenue tend to coincide. The...

This paper contributes to the income inequality literature that is based on the traditional Kuznets model. Level of development, state employment, fiscal redistribution, and price stability are found to improve income inequality in a given country. The positive impact of price stability on...

This paper focuses on the macroeconomic aspects of fiscal management in aid-receiving countries. Despite the declining share of aid in budgets of donor countries, aid continues to play an important role in many developing countries. The paper first discusses the implications of aid in the...

The paper looks at the hypothesis that financial market liberalization can create a basis for more stable exchange rates, as deviations of exchange rates from equilibrium levels bring forth stabilizing flows of liquidity. This hypothesis suggests that opening financial markets militates in favor...

The Czech National Bank has a respectable track record in terms of its policy actions and the corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule, we find that its main communication tools-inflation targets, inflation forecasts, verbal assessments of the inflation risks...

This paper contributes to the analysis of monetary policy in the face of financial instability. In particular, we extend the standard new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices to include a financial system. Our simulations suggest that if financial...