A windfall of foreign aid or natural resource revenue faces government with choices of how to manage public borrowing, public asset accumulation, and the distribution of funds to households (across time and household types), particularly when the windfall is both anticipated and temporary. These...

The political economy of resource rich countries is surveyed. The empirical evidence suggests that countries with a large share of primary exports in GNP have bad growth records and high inequality, especially if the quality of institutions and the rule of law are bad. The economic argument that...

An adverse supply shock hits a two-country Mundell-Fleming world and causes unemployment and a higher cost of living. The optimal fiscal policies under noncooperative and under international policy coordination are then contrasted under three alternative regimes: floating exchange rates with...

A two-country, optimizing model with capital accumulation, purchasing power parity, floating exchange rates, uncovered interest parity, perfect foresight, finite lives and population growth is developed and analyzed. For the special case of a zero birth rate, individuals are indifferent between...

A two-country, intertemporal, perfect-foresight model with micro foundations, floating exchange rates, uncovered interest parity, and nominal wage rigidities is formulated. The benchmark case corresponds to unit elasticities of intertemporal and intratemporal substitution in consumption, no...

This paper discuss the merits of an independent "EuroFed" within the context of a tax/seigniorage smoothing model for a monetary union. There is an incentive to use a surprise inflation tax to wipe out the real value of government debt and wage contracts because this allows a cut in...

We investigate the Hartwick rule for saving of a nation necessary to sustain a constant level of private consumption for a small open economy with an exhaustible stock of natural resources. The amount by which a country saves and invests less than the marginal resource rents equals the expected...

This paper investigates the implications of budgetary policies for consumption and economic growth. We present a model that combines the Arrow-Romer endogenous growth model with the Blanchard-Yaari overlapping-generations model. We show that a rise in government debt, financed by lump-sum taxes,...

In a recent paper, Barrett (2006) reaches the conclusion that in general the answer to the question in the title is no. We show in this paper that a focus on the R&D phase in the development of breakthrough technologies changes the picture. The stability of international treaties improves and...