A recent study of 36 sub-Saharan African countries found a positive impact of aid in the absolute majority of these countries. However, for Tanzania and Ghana, two major aid recipients, aid did not seem to have been equally beneficial. This paper singles out these two countries for a more...

A recent study of 36 Sub Saharan African countries found a positive impact of aid in the absolute majority of these countries. However, for Tanzania and Ghana, two major aid recipients, aid did not seem to have been equally beneficial. This paper singles out these two countries for a more...

The paper discusses the dynamics of inflation and money growth in a stochastic framework, allowing for double unit roots in the nominal variables. It gives some examples of typical I(2) ’symptoms’ in empirical I(1) models and provides both a nontechnical and a technical discussion of the...

The persistent movements away from long-run benchmark values in real exchange rates, dubbed the PPP puzzle, observed in many real exchange rates during periods of currency float have been subject to much empirical research without resolving the puzzle. The paper demonstrates how the cointegrated...

The paper discusses methodological questions related to econometric time-series modelling of I(2) data. Long-run and medium-run relationships between two general price indices, the US CPI and WPI and four commodity prices indices, the WBI, CRBI, GSCI, and ECI are investigated in a multivariate...

Based on a money market analysis the paper discusses possible pitfalls in acroeconomic inference related to inadequate stochastic model formulation. A number of questions related to concepts such as empirical and theoretical steady-states, speed of adjustment, feed-back and interaction effects,...

The present financial and economic crisis has revealed a systemic failure of academic economics and emphasized the need to re-think how to model economic phenomena. Lawson (2009) seems concerned that critics of standard models now will fill academic journals with contributions that make the same...

The cointegrated VAR model is proposed as an empirically coherent framework for analyzing macroeconomic phenomena within a dynamic system of pulling and pushing forces. As an illustration we show how an economic theory for inflation and money demand gives rise to a number of hypotheses...