This 2013 Article IV Consultation highlights that Germany’s economic rebound of 2010–11 gave way to weakening momentum during the course of 2012. Although exports to non-European trading partners began to recover by mid-2012, in line with improved prospects in the United States and...

Overall competitiveness of the Dutch economy seems adequate, but domestically produced exports have lost market share recently. Over the past three decades, globalization has greatly influenced economies as countries have become more integrated. Empirical studies on business cycles...

This paper takes an in-depth look into recent trade patterns to assess the extent of such concerns. It is found that (i) there is no strong evidence of Dutch Disease; (ii) weak performance in some sectors, so far, does not appear to be linked to the commodity boom; and (iii) although further...

Regional integration of Pacific Island countries (PICs) with Australia, New Zealand, and emerging Asia has increased over the last two decades. PICs have become more exposed to the region’s business cycles, and spillovers from regional economies are more important for PICs than from...

The constraints that external linkages impose on domestic policy choices in Saudi Arabia have continuously evolved over the past four decades. This paper argues that two major ongoing developments in particular have affected and will continue to affect policy trade-offs. First, growing oil needs...

Global imbalances have been a central theme of the international economic policy debate for much of the last decade, prompted by large and sustained current account deficits in the U.S. and counterpart surpluses in China, Germany, and among many of the oil producers. This paper focuses on the...

Trade and financial ties between low-income countries (LICs) and Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRICs) have expanded rapidly in recent years. This gives rise to the potential for growth to spill over from the latter to the former. We employ a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model to...