We address the issue of whether financial structure influences economic growth. Three competing views of financial structure exist in the literature: the bank-based, the market-based and the financial services view. Recent empirical studies examine their relevance by utilizing panel and...

Equity prices have been falling since March 2000. How far can they fall before they reach bottom? The current bear market differs from the mid-1970s plunge in equity prices in terms of the causes and, consequently, the factors that should be monitored to test its progress. In the 1970s, the bear...

This paper appraises the current position of the European Union (EU) countries, which could potentially become members of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) which is now likely to materialise in January, 1999, in an attempt to argue that the current EMU criteria should be revised. The paper...

This paper seeks to evaluate the strength of the case for a financial transactions tax, judged against the three rationales which have been proposed for such a tax: the excessive volume of short-term foreign exchange transactions and their effects on exchange rate volatility; the revenue-raising...

This paper reconsiders the case for the use of fiscal policy based on a "functional finance" approach that advocates the use of fiscal policy to secure high levels of demand in the context of private aggregate demand, which would otherwise be too low. This "functional finance" view means that...