The U.S. current account deficit is unsustainable and will need to fall by half as a share of GDP in coming years. The adjustment process will necessarily involve (1) substantial further real effective depreciation of the U.S. dollar, (2) slowing of U.S. demand growth below potential output...

This study attempts to demonstrate how a government launched an economic structural reform plan that previous governments, fearing a serious social backlash, had been unable to implement over the course of 30 years. The findings show that the Iranian government used “illusion therapy”, a...

The food subsidy programs and its long-term effects have emerged as major developmental issues in many developing countries. The programs might increase social welfare to individuals but they pose both an unnecessary burden on the public budget and are economically inefficient because their...

The international dollar standard is malfunctioning. Near zero U.S. short-term interest rates launch massive hot money outflows by carry traders into emerging markets (EM) in Asia and Latin America. Each EM central bank buys dollars to prevent its currency from appreciating but loses monetary...

The flexible exchange rate experiment has been a failure. The best test of any monetary system is the degree to which it avoids unnecessary changes in real exchange rates. These changes drastically reduce the gains from trade and disqualify the arguments ordinarily made for free trade areas and...

This study examines the effects of educational mismatch on wages in the Spanish labour market since the mid-nineties. First we study the evolution of returns to education and then we estimate returns to education in terms of the match between the worker's schooling and the job requirements. The...

Most of the developing countries across the world have opened up their mining industry for private sector participation since late 1980s with a view to increase the overall efficiency of the mineral extraction. But are the private mining firms really efficient than the public sector firms? In...

A meta-analysis explains the variation in estimated trade effects of technical barriers to trade broadly defined, using available estimates from the empirical international trade literature, and accounting for data sampling and methodology differences. Agriculture and food industries tend to be...