In many OECD countries, government debt reached levels over recent years that call for reduction over the medium to longer term to ensure public finance sustainability. This paper investigates the international transmission of fiscal consolidation shocks via trade flows. Using a measure of...

During the first decade of the currency union, business cycle fluctuations among Euro Area countries were relatively synchronised and similar in magnitude. This concordance disappeared during the 2008 financial turmoil and the following European sovereign debt crisis, a time when key flaws in...

Turkey recovered swiftly from the global financial crisis but sizeable macroeconomic imbalances arose in the process. High consumer price inflation and a wide current account deficit are sources of vulnerability. Even though below-potential growth helps rebalancing and disinflation, these...

Effective macroeconomic and structural policies helped Turkey bounce back quickly and strongly from the global crisis, with annual growth averaging close to 9% over 2010-11. However, the current account deficit widened to around 10% of GDP in 2011 and consumer price inflation rose to over 10%....

The tax-to-GDP ratio rose steadily in most EU countries up to the late 1990s, largely reflecting a sustained expansion of public sector commitments to welfare provision. Since the late 1990s, many EU countries have cut tax rates. However, the tax burden in the EU area remains much higher than in...

Monetary and fiscal policies face huge challenges: the banking sector has collapsed; the economy is in the midst of a deep recession; the exchange rate has plunged; capital flows have been frozen; inflation is elevated; public debt has risen; source of revenues have disappeared; social needs have...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

Using the 2008-09 global financial crisis, this paper examines the role of different forms of international financial integration for asset price contagion in crisis times. Defining contagion as the transmission of financial market movements beyond the co-movements that would occur in...

This paper documents some features of recent trends in bond yields and discusses the drivers of these trends. This includes a discussion of the relationship between fiscal balances and interest rates -- with a summary of key empirical results from the literature provided in the Appendix. The...

After the launch of the single currency the euro exchange rate fell and interest rates had converged towards the (low) German level. These shocks have worked out differently for the small and large countries. Housing markets have acted as an important vehicle of transmission of these shocks onto...