Debates surrounding the adoption of a common currency have focused on its benefits weighed against the long-term costs of losing monetary independence. These debates have assumed that the penalty for not adopting a common currency is the maintenance of the status quo. This paper uses the...

This paper investigates the linkages between oil and growth in Congo, where there appears to be no evidence of direct spillover effects. The empirical results suggest however that political instability has a negative effect on non-oil growth, and that the presence of oil could have fueled...

This paper extends the theoretical model of Liaw et al. (2004) to incorporate the supply shocks of output. For a country adopting dual floating exchange rate system and facing the supply shocks will cause the price level to increase persistently. If the price level reaches the price ceiling...

This paper studies the choice of the monetary regime in a small open economy with special focus on the EMU accession countries. In the framework of a two - country DSGE model we conduct policy experiments consisting in analysing the effects of different monetary regimes (roughly representing the...

This paper investigates the factors behind the significant improvement in Brazil's external accounts and wide fluctuations of the real exchange rate since the floating of the real in 1999. Particular attention is devoted to the strong appreciation of the real from 2003-05. Econometric estimates...

Botswana's successive currency devaluations and recent move from a fixed to a crawling peg exchange rate regime raise the question of whether the exchange rate might be misaligned with economic fundamentals. This paper, applying the behavioral equilibrium exchange rate (BEER) approach, analyzes...

Increased attention is being paid to assessments of the actual values of countries' real exchange rates relative to their "equilibrium" values as suggested by "fundamental" determining factors. This paper assesses the robustness of alternative approaches and models commonly used to derive...

This paper reviews alternative approaches to measuring an economy's cost competitiveness and proposes some new measures inspired by the economic theory of index numbers. The indices provide a theoretical benchmark for estimated real effective exchange rates, but differ from standard measures in...

An updated version of Krugman's (1993) MMF framework is used to consider the implications of buoyant domestic demand for the real exchange rate and debt dynamics. The updating includes a Taylor rule for monetary policy and explicit treatment of external assets and liabilities. In response to an...