In most African economies, both agricultural production and the terms- of-trade are highly uncertain. This paper re-examines the implications of such uncertainty for the optimal mix of production and trade under alternative assumptions about international capital flows. The ultimate objective is...

This paper reexamines the stationarity of the dollar-sterling real exchange rate using the two centuries of data analyzed in Lothian and Taylor (LT) (1996). We fit univariate time series models for the real exchange rate that dominate the stationary AR(1) specification chosen by LT and the...

This paper documents a new "stylized fact" regarding commodity prices using alternative datasets covering the period from 1880 to 1996: The volatility of real commodity prices, defined as nominal commodity prices deflated by the manufacturing unit value index, is higher under flexible-exchange...

This paper surveys the recent literature analysing fiscal deficit sustainability, most of which focuses on the U.S. and other industrial countries, in an attempt to assess its potential usefulness in the developing country context. Both the accounting approach and the present value constraint...