The Swedish economy is strongly dependent on global economic developments, which is re ected in generally strong empirical relationships between Swedish and foreign macroeconomic variables. It is, however, diffi cult for standard open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models...

A common finding in the international-economics literature is that the elasticity of substitution between domestically produced and imported goods is smaller in the short than in the long run. Despite this, most of today's commonly used macroeconomic models assume this elasticity to be constant....