Strengthening budgetary surveillance and coordination of budgetary policy measures in the EU is of vital importance for economic stability and growth. The decentralised decision making structure in most areas of budgetary policies, requires the need to balance national and common objectives;...

We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 have clear origins, namely in the delusionary belief in the merits of policies based on a “perpetual money machine” type of thinking. Indeed, we document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has...

The authors explore the usefulness of macroeconomic models in analyzing global economic developments by examining movements in commodity prices between July 2007 and July 2008. They use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model and investigate the longerterm outlook for commodity...

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

The outburst of the 2008 global economic crisis sparked myriad criticism on mainstream neoclassical economic theory, which is blamed for not even have considered the possibility of the kind of collapse that the subprime mortgage meltdown unleashed. In this paper, it is argued that what happened...

A key rationale for fiscal stimulus is to boost consumption when aggregate demand is perceived to be inefficiently low. We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 “Cash for Clunkers” program on short and medium run auto purchases....

This paper examines how supply-side policies may play a role in fighting a low aggregate demand that traps an economy at the zero lower bound (ZLB) of nominal interest rates. Future increases in productivity or reductions in mark-ups triggered by supply-side policies generate a wealth effect...

This paper analyses inflation dynamics in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) using a constructed dataset for country-specific commodity price indices and panel cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) models. Imported commodity price shocks are significant in explaining...

Motivated by the recent experience of the U.S. and the Eurozone, we describe the quantitative properties of a New Keynesian model with a zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates, explicitly accounting for the nonlinearities that the bound brings. Besides showing how such a model can be...

The main focus of the present paper is to analyze the impacts of financial policy on inflation rates. The analysis depended on time series data and was divided into theoretical and applied analytical framework. An econometric model was utilized to reflect the relations between financial policy...