Making EMU Work: Some lessons from the 1990s

This paper investigates what lessons may be learned from Europe's convergence process of the 1990s. The paper challenges the conventional focus on labour market institutions and 'structural rigidities' as the root cause behind Europe's poor employment record. Instead, it is argued that macro demand management played the key role, particularly monetary policy. Concentrating on Germany, the analysis shows that fiscal consolidation was accompanied by monetary tightness of an extraordinary degree and duration. This finding is of interest regarding the past as well as the future. For the Maastricht regime much resembles the one that produced the unsound policy mix of the 1990s: a constrained fiscal authority paired with an independent monetary authority free to impose its will on the overall outcome. The analysis thus highlights a key asymmetry in the Maastricht regime that is likely to continue to inflict a deflationary bias on the system. It is argued that this policy bias may be overcome only if the ECB deliberately assumed its real role of generating domestic demand-led growth, thereby resolving Euroland's key structural problem: asymmetric monetary policy. As regards the conventional structuralist theme, the analysis debunks the 'Dutch myth' of supply-led growth through structural reform. Depicting a popular fallacy of composition, we stress that the peculiar Dutch strategy of demand-led growth does not present itself as an option for Euroland.     

Foreign direct investment,tax competition and social expenditure

The aim of this paper is to make a first step towards studying the role of social expenditure and its interaction with corporate taxation in determining the destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using panel data for 18 OECD countries and measuring the extent of social welfare policies by the (public social expenditure)/GDP ratio, we find strong support for the conjecture that redistributive social welfare state policies are valued by multinationals as, for instance, they may signal a government's commitment to social stability.     

Tariff rate quotas and the economic impact of agricultural trade liberalization in the world trade organization

Since their implementation at the Uruguay Round, tariff rate quotas (TRQs) have become a widely used instrument of trade policy in agricultural trade. With almost 1,300 TRQs scheduled at the World Trade Organization, this paper will examine their economic effects more closely. First, the theoretical background of TRQs is examined. Then, a short overview of the Uruguay Round and their institutional background is given. We demonstrate that official statistics, which do not count TRQs as nontariff barriers, are at least highly misleading. Very often, their effects are the same as those of regular quotas, including redistributive effects. The prominent example of the European banana regime is used to illustrate all of these points.A first draft of this paper was presented at the International Atlantic Economic Conference, March 14–21, 2000, Munich, Germany. The results are part of the research project "The Influence of the Institutional Design on the Actual Impacts of Agricultural Trade Liberalization after GATT." Financial support by Volkswagen Stiftung is gratefully acknowledged.     

A new estimator for trade costs and its small sample properties

This paper discusses the estimation of parameters of a traditional transportation model, as it is typically present in so-called Takayama–Judge type spatial price equilibrium models. In contrast to previously used estimation methods, observations of regional prices as well as of trade costs are used in a direct estimation of the first order conditions. The proposed method uses bi-level programming techniques to minimize a weighted least squares criterion under the restriction that the estimated parameters satisfy the Kuhn–Tucker conditions for an optimal solution of the transport model. A penalty function and a smooth reformulation are used to iteratively approximate the complementary slackness conditions. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to trace out some properties of the estimator and compare it with a traditional calibration method. The analysis shows that the proposed technique estimates prices as well as trade costs more precisely than the traditional calibration method. It is suggested to apply the same method to a range of linear and quadratic models.     

THE EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVENESS IN HUNGARIAN AGRICULTURE: FROM TRANSITION TO ACCESSION

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Änderungen der durchschnittlichen Blutdruckwerte in den Jahren 1956–1968

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Strategy-proofness in many-to-one matching problems

We search forstrategy-proof solutions in the context of (many-to-one) matching problems (Gale and Shapley, 1962). In this model, whenever the firms can hire as many workers as they want (the capacities are unlimited) the stable set is a singleton. There exists aPareto efficient, individually rational, andstrategy-proof matching rule if and only if the capacities are unlimited. Furthermore, whenever the capacities unlimited, the matching rule which selects the unique stable matching is the only matching rule that isPareto efficient, individually rational, andstrategy-proof.