This paper analyzes informational aspects linked with foreign direct investment in economies that just open up to foreign investors and steer towards a market economy. From the viewpoint of foreign firms, such economies are still largely a terra incognita as far as economic and practical...

This paper analyzes informational aspects linked with foreign direct investment in economies that just open up to foreign investors and steer towards a market economy. From the viewpoint of foreign firms, such economies are still terra incognita as far as economic and practical conditions for...

This paper examines inflation dynamics in the current EU-accession countries in central and eastern Europe, focusing particularly on the determinants of 'dual inflation', that is, diverging inflation rates for tradable and non-tradable goods. The paper draws on the recently published data for...

This paper explores the problem of effective taxation at the lower end of the income scale in Germany. For the recipients of social income maintenance--currently about 1.8 million nationals--effective taxation consists not only of the explicit taxation through the tax code but also of the...

Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. This paper proposes a new measure of voting power inspired from Banzhaf (1965) accounting for the proximity between voters by capturing how often they appear in winning coalitions together....

This paper presents a new concept - the global roles of currencies. The concept combines the domestic and international (cross-border) use of currencies, and therefore captures the overall importance of different currencies in a globalized economy. The measure of a currency's global role is...

After having been at the helm of the international monetary system for decades, the International Monetary Fund was sidelined in policy debates in the past few years. One reason for the IMF not having taken a more central role in addressing key global policy issues in recent years relates to its...

This paper sheds new light on the external and domestic dimension of China’s exchange rate policy. It presents an open economy model to analyse both dimensions of macroeconomic adjustment in China under both flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. The model-based results indicate that...

This paper presents a new concept – the global roles of currencies. The concept combines the domestic and international (cross-border) use of currencies and therefore captures the overall importance of different currencies in a globalised economy. The measure of a currency’s global role is...