Britain and the European Monetary System: an American Perspective

How strong is the Case for Britain's entry to the ERM? Christopher Culp, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, argues that the case for British entry is far from clear.     

Why do Employment Rates Differ Across the Regions of Britain?

Both unemployment and non-employment in Great Britain fell steadily after 1993. The ratio of jobs to the working age population — the employment rate — rose. But the increasing regional dispersion of employment rates remains a puzzle. By 2000–01, this dispersion was close to its 1974 and 1985 peak levels, though it has narrowed since 2001. This paper by John Muellbauer & Gavin Cameron ¹ examines this puzzle in the context of different measures of the employment rate and examines what we know and what we do not know about what drives relative employment rates across the British regions. It summarises the findings from an econometric study and examines the outlook for relative employment across the British regions.     

The UK and European Monetary Union: Why we should not stand aside

Ahead of next year's IGC David Currie considers the case for European monetary Union. He argues overall that EMU is desirable, though political arguments dominate the economic ones, which are finely balanced. he also argues that the UK should participate if other member states proceed to EMU, because of the dangers of marginalisation in Europe and of reduced attractiveness as a location for inward investment.     

Why is there not more ‘annualised hours’ working in Britain?

Annualised hours (AH) contracts offer employers greater control over working time at lower cost. These efficiency gains may also be shared with workers in terms of pay or time off work. Yet AH remains relatively rare in the UK. Though under‐researched, one explanation is that AH normally requires collective bargaining, which is disappearing across most of the private sector, and often high‐trust employment relations, which is in still shorter supply.     

Anchor stores

Planned shopping malls usually have one or more department (anchor) stores and multiple specialized retailers selling substitutable commodities in each commodity category. If consumers know their taste for the anchor's commodity and its price, but learn about a retailer's commodity only by costly search, collocation may benefit both store types. Intra-mall competition reduces markups, but anchors guarantee a minimum surplus from search. A mall with many retailers makes finding a suitable specialized commodity highly probable. For some parameters, additional consumer search dominates the loss in retail markups, so a profit-maximizing land developer would rent mall space to both store types.     

Monetary Union or International Monetary Order?

Is European Monetary Union desirable? Pascal Salin, of the Univeristy of Paris, argues that any system of fixed exchange rates such as the EMS Exchange Rate Mechanism, is likely to prove unsatisfactory.     

Why Eradicating Urban Poverty Requires a Long Term Multi-Program 'War': A Review of Anti-Poverty Strategies for the Needs of the Late 70s

Abstract . Identifying who are the urban poor may help determine why poverty exists in our cities; and, of course, knowing why people are poor is a prerequisite for designing effective policies to eradicate the problem. As the statistics presented in this paper demonstrate, poverty has many causes and, therefore, a successful ‘war’ on poverty will necessarily have to be long term and multi-programmed. One essential part of that ‘war,’ of course, will be an attack on racial and sexual discrimination in labor markets; but, as this paper's analysis of the possible underlying causes of such discrimination points out, economic progress alone may be insufficient—racial and sexual prejudice itself will have to be eradicated.     

Managed Floating as a Monetary Policy Strategy

Although there seems to be a broad consensus among economists that purely floating or completely fixed exchange rates (the so-called corner solutions) are the only viable alternatives of exchange rate management, many countries do not behave according to this paradigm and adopt a strategy within the broad spectrum of exchange rate regimes that is limited by the two corner solutions. Many of these intermediate regimes are characterized by significant foreign exchange market interventions and a certain degree of exchange rate flexibility with non-preannounced exchange rate targets. While academic research in this area usually concentrates on some specific aspects of intermediate regimes (such as the effectiveness of interventions or institutional aspects), managed floating has rarely been analyzed as a comprehensive monetary policy strategy. In this paper, we present a monetary policy framework in which central banks simultaneously use the exchange rate and the interest rate as operating targets of monetary policy. We explain the mechanics of foreign exchange market interventions and sterilization and we explain why a central bank has an interest of controlling simultaneously the two operating targets. We derive the monetary policy rules for the two operating targets from a simple open economy macro model in which the uncovered interest parity condition and the monetary conditions index play a central role.     

The Conduct of Monetary Policy Without Monetary Aggregates

A central dilemma for the monetary authorities is how to determine monetary policy. The increasing unreliability of monetary aggregates has led over the past few years to less concern for monetary targeting, both in the UK and elsewhere, and a greater influence for the exchange rate on monetary policy. But in the UK, most recently, there has been a move away from setting monetary policy in relation to the exchange rate and external considerations in favour of setting monetary policy in relation to domestic demand. Not surprisingly, this shift has occurred at a time of rising concern about domestic overheating. It illustrates the dilemma of whether monetary policy should be driven by domestic demand considerations or by external, exchange rate considerations. This dilemma is not just confined to the UK for it is a real source of conflict underlying the Louvre Accord and its successors that seek to determine G7 exchange rates in a cooperative manner. In what follows, we argue that exchange rate developments should have an appreciable influence on monetary policy, since this is helpful in attaining stable inflation. But we also suggest that this influence should not go too far, since this stability of inflation may be at the expense of stability of domestic demand and output. Targeting of exchange rates within narrow bands is unlikely to be desirable, unless fiscal policy can be used more flexibly to stabilize domestic demand. This suggests that, in the period up to the spring, the use of monetary policy to hold the £/JDM exchange rate within narrow limits may have been overdone. More seriously, international exchange rate agreements among the G7 countries are likely to founder under adverse market pressures, unless current imbalances in fiscal policy are adjusted. In the absence of greater flexibility in fiscal policy, policy makers will have to trade off domestic and exchange rate considerations in determining monetary policy. An important outstanding issue that needs further consideration is what indicators should be used for monetary policy, in a world in which monetary aggregates provide unreliable signals.     

Monetary Policy

We are fast approaching the point at which the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will have to make a decision about the future of its forward guidance policy. The policy had been intended to reassure households, firms and markets that Bank Rate would remain at 0.5% for a prolonged period. However, the economy and, in particular the labour market, have improved so quickly that unemployment will reach the 7% threshold within the next few months, more than two years earlier than the Bank had forecast when it introduced forward guidance…     

Monetary policy

The past three months have seen market interest rates rise sharply across the yield curve. At the shorter end, overnight index swap (OIS) rates, which the Bank of England uses to calculate market expectations of the path of Bank Rate, imply that markets now expect the first increase in rates to come within the next eighteen months. At the same time the longer end of the yield curve has also risen, with the yield on 10‐year government bonds briefly rising above 3% in early September, the first time that this has happened since July 2011…     

Monetary policy

The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) had been split over the first half of the year, with one camp of three members unconvinced by evidence of strengthening activity and consistently voting for further QE, and the remaining six members content to maintain the current policy stance…     

某地下室中抗浮锚杆的应用及分析

随着城市化进程加快,建筑空间不断向地下发展和延伸。在一些抗浮水位较高的地区,水浮力可能引起地下室底板隆起开裂、建筑物整体上浮、梁柱及墙体开裂,甚至将桩体拉断,严重影响建筑物安全和使用。工程中一般采用堆载加固、抗浮锚杆或抗浮桩、浮力消除等方法进行抗浮设计。由于施工简单、布置灵活、受力合理、造价低廉等特点,抗浮锚杆越来越多地应用在工程中。本文通过某医院工程实例,详细阐述抗浮锚杆的设计与施工,为类似地下室抗浮设计提供参考。     

Monetary policy

The MPC set out ‘phase two’ of forward guidance in February. The strength of the recovery and the sharp fall in unemployment towards the 7% threshold used for the MPC's first phase of forward guidance had led investors to bring forward their expectations for the timing of the first rate hike…     

Monetary reaction functions in a small open economy

Monetary reaction functions are constructed in an intertemporal optimization framework. The time-varying coefficients to be put on the variations of the exchange rate and the asset stock are then derived by solving a matrix Riccati equation. As the planning horizon extends to infinity, a related algebraic Riccati equation coincides with those derived from minimization of stationary state variances only under certain conditions. Under the assumed full information by the government, reaction functions using realized values of exogenous shocks result in dynamics that do not enjoy the same stability property as the ones obtained by explicit intertemporal optimization.     

Monetary Fiasco: Is there a Culprit?

Criticism of the Bank of England over the excess supply of money neglects its fundamental role in supplying money to the financial institutions to ensure the efficiency of the capitalist economy. Rather than reduce the supply of money directly, the Government has correctly attempted to reduce demand for it by using high interest rates to raise its price.     

创建和谐社会需要标准化

我国正在创建和谐社会,创建和谐社会更离不开标准化工作,从社会安全的和谐、农业发展的和谐、城市规划的和谐、企业发展的和谐、资源环境的和谐5个方面探讨了和谐社会与标准化的关系.