The Intertemporal Equilibrium Modeling of Intra-EMU and Global Trade Imbalances

The intertemporal equilibrium approach to current accounts analyzed the impacts of respective intra-European Monetary Union (intra-EMU) and Asian-U.S. financial integration between 1999 and 2007 on the intra-EMU current account and global trade imbalances. Moreover, Farmer and Ban (2014) find in a three-country, two-region overlapping generations model that financial integration between both the EMU core and periphery and between Asia and the U.S. induce trade surpluses in the EMU core and Asia, while in the EMU periphery and in the U.S., trade balances become negative when the global economy is dynamically inefficient. In this paper, we first show that in a numerically specified Farmer-Ban model, steady-state trade balance to gross domestic product ratios are too low compared to the empirically observed counterparts. We suggest avenues to ameliorate this problem.