The SME access-to-finance problem is not universal in the European Union and there are reasons for the fall in credit aggregates and higher SME lending rates in southern Europe. Possible market failures, high unemployment and externalities justify making greater and easier access to finance for...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy to macroeconomic variables in three new EU Member States in comparison with that in the euro area with structural time-varying coefficient vector autoregressions. In line with the Lucas Critique reduced-form models like standard VARs are not...

This paper assesses the impact of the 2008-09 global financial and economic crisis on the medium-term growth prospects of the countries of central and eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which began an economic transition about two decades ago. We use cross-country growth regressions,...

There are two possible responses to the Greek debt crisis: 'Plan A', continued official lending, for as long as needed, with possible voluntary private sector involvement, and 'Plan B', coercive pre-emptive or post-default restructuring with significant face value reduction. Both options have...

We use data on exchange rates and consumer price indices and the weighting matrix derived by Bayoumi, Lee and Jaewoo (2006) to calculate consumer price index-based REER. The main novelties of our database are that (1) it includes data for 178 countries - many more than in any other publicly...

Iceland, Ireland and Latvia experienced similar developments before the crisis. However, the crisis hit Latvia harder than any other country, and Ireland also suffered heavily, while Iceland exited the crisis with the smallest fall in employment, despite the greatest shock to the financial...

Greece, Portugal and Spain face a serious risk of external solvency due to their close to minus 100 percent of GDP net negative international investment positions, which are largely composed of debt. The perceived inability of these countries to rebalance their external positions is a major root...

- Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...

GDP contractions are typically associated with within-country income inequality increases. While official income inequality data for 2020 will not be available for about two years, the already available employment data for 2020 shows that the difference between highly-educated and low-educated...