The US dollar is frequently used as the invoicing currency of international crude oil trading. Hence, the fluctuation in US dollar exchange rate is believed to underlie the volatility of crude oil price and especially its forecasting accuracy. Using econometric techniques including...

In August 2006 the South African government announced quotas on the imports of clothing and textile products from China. Three questions arise. What are these expected benefits? What will be the most likely impact of the import quotas on the South African economy? And what are the policy...

While a number of crises in emerging markets generated widespread contagion in financial markets during the 1990s, more recent crises (notably, in Argentina) have been mostly contained within national borders. This has led some observers to wonder whether contagion might have become a feature of...

We show analytically that the credibility problem which has affected the European Stability Pact originates from the insufficient distinction between two reasons for having binding fiscal constraints. The first reason deals with the governments' tendency to neglect the effects of their fiscal...

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have used petroleum revenues to fund employment programs as a main means for supporting the welfare of their populations. The public sector in GCC countries seeks to provide every national labor market entrant with a job, reflecting the policy of...

This paper examines the welfare and distributional implications of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Bangladesh in a general equilibrium framework. The major findings are that MFIs raise income and consumption levels of households, reduce income inequality and enhance welfare. This implies...

Egypt has presented important budget imbalances. This paper tries to evaluate whether Egypt's public deficit has had any impact on current account imbalances, examining the validity of the twin-deficit hypothesis for Egypt. We conclude for the presence of a (weak) long-run relationship between...

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Egypt during the period 1960-2001 within a trivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) framework (investment being the additional variable). We employ four different measures of financial development and...

This paper investigates the effect of subsidies on the adoption of information and communication technology in Italy. We argue that the important geographical differences between North and South Italy are something that public policy should be concerned of. A matching estimator is used to...

This paper provides an applied general equilibrium analysis of several alternative taxation regimes applying to private pensions. The analysis focuses on the implications of this and other pension tax regimes for intergenerational equity, national living standards, labour supply, saving and...