This paper contributes to the debate on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal consolidation. The analysis focuses on the western European countries of the EMU. In deviation to the relevant literature external imbalances are explicitly taken into account and the longer-term impact on productivity...

Unparalleled is a word that best describes the current state of advanced economies. Interest rates are low in many advanced countries and negative in a few others suggesting that monetary policy has lost its effectiveness. The economic policy tool that has not been implemented yet by many...

This paper observes the possible co-movements of oil price and CO2 emissions in China by following wavelet coherence and wavelet partial coherence analyses to be able to depict short-run and long-run co-movements at both low and high frequencies. To this end, this research might provide the...

Many countries badly mismanage their natural resource endowments. We argue that a fundamental change in paradigm is needed. Specifically, we advocate treating non-renewable natural resources as a finite shared inheritance asset, and extraction as the sale of the inherited wealth. We identify...

In this paper, we consider how European institutions contributed to the euro crisis. In principle, the Stability and Growth Pact was intended to minimize externalities by preventing macro-economic "bad behavior" in the form of large budget deficits. In practice, it has had a difficult history,...

As it also happened in many Latin American countries during the 60s and 70s, inflation became one of the main economic problems in the Brazilian economy. The acceleration of prices and hyperinflation coexisted not only with periods of economic expansion (1956-1979), but also with huge...

Fiscal stimuli to recover? A cascade of academic and layman-articles debate the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stimulating the economy backed up by different economic models and empirical support. This essay surveys the theoretical predictions and recent empirical Vector Autoregression (VAR)...

While current instruments of EU economic policy coordination helped stave off a full-scale depression, the post-2007 global financial and economic crisis has revealed a number of weaknesses in the Stability and Growth Pact, the EU framework for fiscal surveillance and fiscal policy coordination....

We examine the historical dynamics of government debt in Post-Unification Italy, from 1861 to 2009. Unit root tests for the debt-GDP ratio are unable to reject either the non stationarity or the stationarity null hypothesis. Controlling debt dynamics for fiscal feedback policies of the...