The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis has been particularly acute in the euro area Member States of the south-western rim and in the new EU Member States, due to their previously accumulated macroeconomic and financial imbalances. The perception that the euro environment provided a solid...

‘The Great Recession' was preceded by a prolonged period of high growth accompanied by low and stable inflation, the so-called ‘Great Moderation'. During that period, potential growth estimates were trending upwards and output gaps remained small. However, other imbalances were progressively...

This paper explores the role of international reserves as a stabilizer of international capital flows during periods of global financial stress. In contrast with previous contributions, aimed at explaining net capital flows, we focus on the behavior of gross capital flows. We analyze an...

Sovereign external assets (SEAs) comprise foreign exchange reserves and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). The global stock of reserves reached 7 $trn in the second quarter of 2008, but data on SWF are rather elusive. Our estimation puts the SWFs at around 2,5 $trn dollars by 2007 and in the last...

After the recent crisis, a reduction was observed in global current account (“flow”) imbalances. Even so, global disequilibria as measured in terms of countries' net foreign assets (“stock imbalances”) kept increasing. This paper discusses whether stock imbalances have a stabilising or...

Their strong macroeconomic position when the financial crisis erupted allowed Latin American economies to mitigate its impact through fiscal expansions, reversing the characteristic procyclical behaviour of fiscal policy. At the same time, in the last two decades fiscal rules have been...