The liberalization and re-regulation of the European electricity industries have been driven by the European Commission's attempt to create one internal competitive electricity market. The European electricity directives require the vertical separation of the European electricity firms to enable...

The paper provides an overview of the post-1998 Turkish economy and constructs a macroeconomic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to illustrate the real and financial sectoral adjustments of the Turkish economy under the conditionalities of the 'twin targets': on primary surplus to gross...

This paper describes the Brazilian experience with inflation targeting in 1999-2006. The data presented in the paper show that inflation targeting managed to reduce inflation in Brazil after its 1999 and 2002 currency crises, with a substantial help of exchange-rate appreciation. The data also...

In this article we analyse the combination of a minimum wage and a devaluation/depreciation so as to release the external constraint on growth. The policy maker aims at achieving both balanced trade and higher growth. These may be reached by devaluating the domestic currency, which however...

The question addressed in this paper is whether the possibility of exit from unemployment to the previous employer affects the duration of unemployment spells in Sweden. The empirical analysis is performed using an employee-employer dataset that includes a number of enterprise characteristics...

This paper assesses class-based preferences towards anti-inflationary and anti-unemployment policy. Using a consistent cross-country social survey, I find that the working class broadly defined, and those with lower occupational skill and status are more likely to prioritize combating...

This article recognizes the highly differentiated nature of UK mortgages. Applying hedonic pricing models in the generation of interest quality adjusted indices this study would suggest the need for a 0.24 percentage point increase in the retail price index (RPI) (which, at an average RPI of 3%,...

In this paper we argue that there is scant justification for replacing the traditional fixed-basket Laspeyres price index with so called 'true cost of living indices'. We begin with a discussion of the possible explanations for some empirical results for inflation found for different social...

There is a common belief that currency depreciation worsens the trade balance in the short run and improves it in the long run resulting in the so called J-curve phenomenon. Early studies employed aggregate data and provided mixed results. Recent studies, however, have employed disaggregated...

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public investment or public capital can increase GDP. In comparison with the literature on the subject, we apply many different methodologies to answer these questions. A vector autoregressive (VAR) model (for France, Italy, Germany, the...