Current macroeconomic policy promotes continuous economic growth. Unemployment, poverty and debt are associated with insufficient growth. Economic activity depends upon the transformation of natural materials, ultimately returning to the environment as waste. Current levels of economic throughput exceed the planet‘s carrying capacity. As a result of poorly constructed economic institutions, soc...

We analyze optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy with distortionary labor income taxes, nominal rigidities and nominal debt of various maturities. Optimal policy prescribes the exclusive use of long term debt. Such debt mitigates the distortions associated with hedging fiscal shocks by allowing the government to allocate them efficiently across states and periods.

The introductory phase of the European Monetary Union ended with the emission of euro currency in 2002. We present a review of the experiences with the new monetary union. Using a Taylor-rule, we analyze the ECB’s conduct of monetary policy. The empirical results suggests that the ECB applies similar weights to inflation and the output gap as the Bundesbank in the past, but more than proportion...

The Government, when it came to power in 1997, adopted a monetary and fiscal policy framework which was intended to deliver low and stable inflation, high and stable economic growth and fiscal balance as a basis for fairness between generations. It is abundantly clear from the chaos of the past few weeks that the policy has failed. Given that the policy goals are unlikely to be criticised, the ...

The idea that a common monetary policy in a monetary union imposes costs when compared with independent policies at the country level is largely widespread in the literature. This result leads directly to a greater emphasis on national Þscal policies. We show in this paper that a common monetary policy has more power to asymmetrically affect countries than is usually stated in the literature. A...

We study fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union with the potential for rollover crises in sovereign debt markets. Member-country fiscal authorities lack commitment to repay their debt and choose fiscal policy independently. A common monetary authority chooses inflation for the union, also without commitment. We first describe the existence of a fiscal externality that arises in the pres...