On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

The paper provides an account of the current global economic situation, outlook and policy options. Medium-term prospects are mediocre and fraught with considerable downside risk. Fiscal and monetary policy options for the main industrial countries to improve global economic performance are...

This paper contains a selective review of some of the key fiscal issues faced by transition economies. The twelve countries that provide the empirical background for this study have all been under Fund programmes for at least some of the time since they initiated their transitions from plan to...

The paper studies an idealized gold standard in a two-country setting. Unless national policies for domestic credit expansion (dce) are flexible enough to offset the effect of money demand shocks on international gold reserves, the gold standard collapses with certainty in finite time through a...