This paper explores the importance of the terms of trade to explain output fluctuations in Colombia, a developing country where almost 60% of the exports correspond to four commodities: oil (32%), coal (17%), coffee (5%) and nickel (2%), and where 80% of its imports are intermediate and capital...

This paper discusses some of the inter-temporal issues that arise in the pursuit of real undervaluation to achieve rapid development. Policy makers face a trade-off between achieving a capital stock target in a given amount of time on the one hand and boosting real wages and output in the short...

Unilateral euroization is underexplored even in comparison to unilateral dollarization (taken to mean the adoption of the US dollar as legal tender). This paper attempts to partly fill this gap in the literature by investigating the case of Montenegro, which is one of the two countries that have...

I develop the implications for real exchange rate cycles of different policy preferences, focusing in particular on broadly stylized features of major Latin American and East Asian economies. Recent political science literature has emphasized the role of factors such as the influence of the...

Is growth in capitalist economies wage-led or profit-led? Empirical studies have found conflicting results for different countries and periods. Possible reasons may include differences in the monetary policy/exchange rate regimes across countries and between macro behavior in the short- and...

Growth in low-income developing economies with large sectors charac- terized by underemployment is unlikely to be wage-led in the traditional neo-Kaleckian sense of the term. Output and employment in the sectors of the economy producing non-tradable output could be demand-led, how- ever, and...

Existing empirical studies have focused on determinants of investment. We focus instead on episodes of accelerated capital stock growth that last eight years or longer. We find that episodes are relatively common, even in low growth regions, but more so in middle income and Asian countries....

Evidence regarding the relationship between distribution, demand, and growth in the short run has been mixed. Open economy models that create the possibility of "beggar-thy-neighbor" growth offer one theoretical explanation for why this may be expected. Several authors have argued recently,...

An important body of literature explores the political economy reasons underlying delays in macroeconomic stabilization. This paper develops a framework to analyze conflict between two groups of economic actors, one that has an endowment of internationally tradable goods and another that is...

Real exchange rate policy can potentially be utilized to target the trade balance and/or development through capital accumulation. However, the presence of distributional conflict and the trade-off between current and future trade imbalances complicates matters. I show that policy assignment...