The purpose of this paper is to examine the sensitivity of the Turkish economy’s natural rate of growth to the actual rate of growth, covering the period 1980-2008. To determine the reason why the natural rate of growth is endogenous, the long-run and the causality relationships between real...

The paper analyses the mistakes made in the management of the fiscal policy in Spain before the crisis. The authors argue that the low size of the public expenditures, the adoption of a procyclical expansionary fiscal policy the years before the crisis, and the lack of a correct coordination...

The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and it’s Fiscal Compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticise the debt brake. Firstly, we show that it suffers from serious shortcomings and that its success is...

The conventional narrative for the European debt crisis stresses three factors, namely, bad policies and profligacy in the afflicted countries – mostly southern ones, flaws in the EMU design, and wise policies in the northern frugal countries. This paper argues that the root causes of the...

This paper studies why public finances in Sweden have remained very strong during the current financial crisis. Unlike almost all other European countries, Sweden has had budget surpluses and a government debt ratio around 40 percent of GDP during the recent crisis. We attribute this to two...

This paper outlines a long-term policy and institutional framework for reducing the intensity of recessions, debt crises and financial instabilities, especially for the Core nations and areas that bore the brunt of the anomalies during 2008-2013. We argue that institutional changes need to be...

This paper assesses the monetary consequences of the Latin-American integration process. Over the period 1991-2007, we analyze a sample of five Latin-American countries focusing on the feasibility of a monetary union between L.A. economies. To this end, we study the issue of business cycle...

Included in the regional cooperation of SEE countries, trade liberalization is considered the most important factor of a sustainable economic growth which should contribute to the mutual trade among SEE countries, growth of the foreign direct investments, further production specialization and...

This paper deals with the synchronization of business cycles and economic shocks between the euro area and acceding countries. We therefore extract the business cycle component of output by using Hodrick-Prescott filter. Supply and demand shocks are recovered from estimated structural VAR models...