This article focuses on issues surrounding international oil markets within the wider context of international energy, the global economy, and conflicting agendas such as energy security and climate change. It is suggested that important aspects of the current situation appear...

The major controversies over alternative strategies for the UK economy are surveyed and evaluated in a non-technical manner, concentrating on the positions of three groups prominent in economic forecasting and policy analysis-the National Institute, the London Business School Centre for Economic...

This article considers the role of fiscal policy within a European Monetary Union. There are two quite different issues. The first is the medium-term problem of deficits and debt. The Maastricht fiscal convergence criteria are usually seen as an imperfect response to the need to contain...

Decentralisation and Reform in Latin America analyses the process of intergovernmental reform in Latin America in the last two decades and presents a number of emerging issues. These include the impacts of decentralization and the response of countries in the region to challenge such as social...

Experience indicates that fiscal rules can be helpful as a disciplinary device at the central government level. This article explores whether fiscal rules could be usefully adopted in a decentralised framework, where the behaviour of subnational governments may undermine fiscal discipline.

This paper discusses a methodology for assessing the effects of a government budget on the economy, the "weighted budget balance" (WBB) approach, which is intermediate between using the simple budget balance and using a complete econometric model of the relationships between the budget and other...