The 1990s appreciation of the US$ has been blamed on the 'irrational exuberance' of investors in the US IT boom. A core of these investors appeared to believe that technology-related productivity growth (due, in part, to knowledge spill-over externalities) would raise the relative US rate of...

The Washington Consensus emphasizes the economic costs of real exchange rate distortions. However, a sizable recent empirical literature finds that undervalued real exchange rates help countries to achieve faster economic growth. This paper shows that recent findings are driven by inappropriate...

Standard macro models cannot explain why real exchange rates are volatile and disconnected from macro aggregates. Recent research argues that models with persistent growth rate shocks and recursive preferences can solve that puzzle. I show that this result is highly sensitive to the structure of...

The early 21st century saw Australia experience its largest and longest terms of trade boom. This paper places this recent boom in a long-run historical context by comparing the current episode with earlier cycles. While similarities exist across most episodes, current macroeconomic policy...

International pressure to revalue China's currency stems in part from the expectation that rapid economic growth should be associated with a real exchange rate appreciation. This hinges on the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis under which economic growth, stemming from improvements in traded sector...

The world's two population giants have undergone significant, and significantly different, demographic transitions since the 1950s. The demographic dividends associated with these transitions during the first three decades of this century are examined using a global economic model that...

A new set of estimates of policy induced distortions to relative prices is used to examine how they affect economic growth. We find that on impact there is no significant response of relative agricultural price distortions to changes in real GDP per capita growth of Sub-Saharan African...

Product and financial market integration determine the global implications of China’s recent growth surge and its on-going transition from export led growth. These alter China’s structural imbalance (its excess product supply and excess saving), which in turn shifts the...

Opinion over the global implications of China's rise is divided between critics, who see it as having developed at the expense of both investment and employment in the US, Europe and Japan and proponents who emphasise improvements in the terms of trade and reductions to the cost of financing...

The timing of China‘s and India‘s demographic transitions and the implications of alternative fertility scenarios are here explored using a global economic model incorporating full demographic behavior and measures of dependency that include the working aged and those of working age who do...