With global supply chains, any value added or production task can be traded as part of goods. This means that competitiveness can be measured either in terms of “tasks” (Bems and Johnson, 2012), or goods, but with goods prices reflecting the cost of tasks embedded in those goods. We show...

A surge of exports in the 2000s helped Japan exit the severe decade-long stagnation known as the lost decade. Using panel data of Japanese exporting firms, we examine the sources of the export surge during this period. One view argues that the so-called "divine wind" or exogenous external demand...

An externally driven economic recovery has continued gathering strength in 2010 in Luxembourg. Executive Directors welcomed this development and the authorities’ supportive fiscal policy in 2010 as well as their role in stabilizing the financial sector. According to the Financial Sector...

The analysis in this paper suggests that import and export volume elasticities are markedly lower in oil-exporting Middle East and Central Asian countries than in non-oil countries in the region. A key implication of this finding is that a real appreciation of the exchange rate in oil-exporting...