This paper explores the role of international reserves as a stabilizer of international capital flows during periods of global financial stress. In contrast with previous contributions, aimed at explaining net capital flows, we focus on the behavior of gross capital flows. We analyze an...

Over the last decade economic integration has advanced in both areas, and this has been seen as an opportunity for real convergence in Latin America and in the European periphery. But our approach emphasises that integration has to be supplemented by macroeconomic stability and structural...

New EU members share two very marked features which have conflicting implications for the evolution of their real exchange rates in the long run: accelerated growth and systematic current account imbalances, which would anticipate, respectively an appreciation and a depreciation of their...

Between 1990 and 2001 the Argentine peso appreciated by 80 percent in real terms, and its overvaluation has been singled out as one of the main suspects in the debate on the causes of the Argentina collapse of late 2001. This paper assesses the degree of real misalignment in Argentina over the...

We test the Barro-Gordon model extended to allow for persistence in unemployment. First, we build an index of central bank independence and measures of persistence, and then we compare them with inflation performance in OECD countries. Our results show, as theory predicts, a robust negative...

In recent years, for most emerging markets, public debt has decreased and its composition has evolved toward domestic currency. This progress is remarkable in terms of reduced financial vulnerability, which has been underpinned by favourable financing conditions and related deepening of local...

This paper studies two aspects of the behaviour of provincial relative prices in Spain: the relevance and the nature of provincial inflation divergences and relative price shifts. Inflation differentials are found to be small (the range is less than half point per year in the long-run), but...

A simple method to estimate multilateral equilibrium real exchange rates in a cointegration framework is used to compute the equilibrium real exchange rate for the peseta. The stock of foreign assets and the evolution of sectoral prices have been considered to be the fundamentals for the real...

This paper explores the impact of actual exchange rate regimes on fiscal discipline, which we purportedly link to the effect of announcing the peg and to the availability of external funds. To stress this point, the focus of the analysis is emerging markets spanning from the beginning of the...

A remarkable fact of the mushrooming remittances market is the absence of commercial banks as relevant players. Furthermore, remittances have been identified as a potential catalyst for the financial deepening of receiving countries through higher access to banking services by migrants'...