This study assesses the sustainability of Botswana’s diamond-related fiscal revenue. Diamond reserves are not adequate to generate enough permanent revenue to sustain a high level of expenditure. Under the current fiscal rule that no debt may be accumulated, Botswana will have to save more to...

To analyze how Estonia can benefit from further integration with the European Union, we use the macroeconomic model developed at the Bank of Estonia and perform some simulations. The results show that Estonia will benefit much more from an improvement in domestic productive capacities than from...

Based on stylized facts on South Africa, this article provides a simple theoretical framework to analyze the relations between reducing working time, unemployment, education and growth. It is flexible enough to provide some main macro-economic implications of work sharing, especially in terms of...

The nature of expectations matters when conducting monetary policy. Models with a learning process can exhibit very different properties from models with other types of expectations rules. This paper draws on the work of Orphanides and Williams (2002), extending it to allow for the possibility...

This paper documents the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's current approach to dealing with structural change, an important feature of New Zealand's recent macroeconomic history after the profound economic reforms undergone in the past twenty years. Traditional estimated macroeconomic models of New...

This paper reviews the literature on applications of state- space modelling to macroeconomic questions, with four examples related to modelling unobserved trends, transition across different steady states, expectations formation and forecasting/data revision issues. Due to the flexibility of the...

The interest rate which corresponds to neutral monetary policy settings in New Zealand appears to have trended downwards since at least the stabilisation of inflation in 1992. We present several alternative estimates of a time varying neutral real interest rate (NRR) in state space models, which...