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15-Jul-2009
We find evidence of two cointegrating vectors, which we identify as bank loan demand and supply functions by testing for a number of exclusion and exogeneity restrictions on the cointegrating relationships.
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15-Jul-2009
The main empirical findings are that government spending is a powerful determinant of education outcomes, but this is not the case for health, and that spending on non education programmes are also at least as important.
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10-Jul-2009
Indonesia is a very interesting case for empirically testing the impact of minimum-wage legislation on employment and informality. The country went through a process of fiscal decentralisation in 2001 that, among other things, devolved minimum-wage setting responsibilities to the provinces and local governments.
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06-Jul-2009
The computation of non linear impulse response functions suggests that the system’s history, as well as the sign and magnitude of shocks, affect the current account’s responses to exogenous changes in income, government consumption and investment. In particular, responses to fiscal shocks depend on whether they are positive or negative and whether they follow periods of fiscal expansions or contractions.
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06-Jul-2009
Brazil, like other natural resource exporting countries, has benefited from a sharp increase in commodity prices over the last few years. To investigate the possible impact of terms of trade gains on the real economy, this paper estimates normalised quadratic input demand and output supply functions for the Brazilian economy during 1997-2008.
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20-Apr-2009
The severe economic downturn and high output volatility, in the context of the currency board, underscore the importance of well-designed fiscal policies to help mitigate shocks. Since Estonia’s fiscal policy now exercises a pro-cyclical bias, the key challenge is to develop gradually its counter-cyclical role without jeopardizing sustainability. The government could achieve this objective by modifying the rule of annually balanced budgets and balance the budget over the business cycle while letting the automatic stabilizers respond freely to short-term fluctuations.
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20-Apr-2009
Following EU accession Estonia experienced a loan financed boom. The boom was characterised by overinvestment in the real estate and construction sectors fuelled by strong growth in housing loans, particularly those with variable interest and denominated in foreign currency. Now these sectors are facing a downturn, which has already affected overall economic activity. Since the two sectors are closely linked, problems in one may spill over to the other.
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20-Apr-2009
In recent years, the Estonian labour market was characterized by rising employment, declining unemployment, and skill and labour shortages that contributed to large wage increases. Labour productivity grew rapidly, but the level remains low. While the aggregate labour market outcomes improved, differences persisted among ethnic groups, regions, and workers with different skill levels. As Estonia entered recession in 2008, unemployment increased from 4% in the 2nd quarter to 7.6% in the 4th quarter, and is expected to rise further in 2009 and 2010.
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20-Apr-2009
Estonia swiftly established a modern market economy. Today, the country is considered to have one of the most open and competitive economies in the world. The dynamism of the business environment is reflected in higher rates of firm and job creation than in other European emerging market economies, as well as in large foreign direct investment inflows. Estonia is particularly well regarded in ICT network readiness and well-functioning e-government.
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24-Jul-2008
Indonesia’s economic performance is improving and growth is picking up. An important policy challenge is to sustain high growth over the longer term so as to ensure a faster catch-up in living standards relative to the OECD area.
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Economic Survey of Denmark 2009
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