Only three years after its initial endorsement by the World Bank and the IMF in 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) - Initiative was considerably altered and enhanced. How did this change come about? Neither developments in economic theory, nor empirical evidence of changed...

Most proposals for Asian monetary cooperation assign a special role to the Japanese yen as an anchor currency. We focus instead on the potential role of the Chinese renminbi. It becomes increasingly clear that China will assume the role of the dominant economy in the region, and that it will...

The “conservative central banker” has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...