Volume 15, Issue 2 -

Europe’s GDP growth is gathering pace as a consequence of both sound policies and external factors. Forecasts are being revised upwards even though they keep potential growth estimates low. This article argues that there are good reasons to expect a scenario with higher medium term growth, where reforms are accelerated, and increases in investment, productivity, and labor participation offset the decline in population and temporary legacies from the crisis. Several studies show the big growth gains from this scenario. Moreover, experience in various European countries confirms that it is feasible. Reforms are underpinned by the current accommodative monetary policy and by a responsible, but more flexible, fiscal policy stance that smoothens adjustment, improves fairness, and supports demand in countries with fiscal space. Successes in growth-enhancing reforms, better awareness of their potential net benefits, and more attention to prevent or reduce negative distributional effects, may restore trust and garner citizens’ support for this growth model. They may also help overcome the obstacles to further integration that should make this model more robust.

The “Euro Crisis” has been a dominant concern of policymakers and analysts for half a decade, but the debate too often resembles a dialogue of the deaf. Some of this is because important points do not have clear answers and people often start from very different sets of assumptions or analytical approaches. However, more of the mis-communication probably stems from the multi-faceted and ambiguous nature of the term “Euro Crisis” and related framings of the issue. The Euro Crisis is really a set of overlapping crises, with substantial differences in their character, timeframe, and potential solutions. Understanding the nature of these crises is critical to predicting the future development of Europe.

The European Union (EU) currently comprised of 28 countries is heralded as the single most ambitious voluntary supra-national economic, trade and monetary arrangement in recent modern history. The initial impetus of this arrangement began in 1951 with The Coal and Steel Union amongst Germany, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Netherlands, and Italy and it continues to evolve today. The most ambitious part of this arrangement is the economic and monetary union (EMU) of 19 EU members countries called the Eurozone. This grand experiment has recently faced its biggest stress test with a double dip recession – the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2010+ European sovereign debt crisis. While many experts focused on the lack of fiscal union to resolve the Eurozone’s current problems, the issues are more complex. Systemic risk in Eurozone originates in part from three principal areas: political issues, lack of a fiscal discipline enforcement mechanism, and market failure.

Almost all previous studies that have tested the law of one price or Purchasing Power Parity theory (PPP) have used either real effective exchange rates or bilateral real exchange rates which are constructed using CPI or PPI data. Most of these studies have failed to support the PPP mostly due to aggregation bias. A few recent studies, have, therefore used commodity prices in different countries and have provided strong support for the theory. These studies have mostly used data from industrial countries. In this paper, we use individual prices of 52 retail items from 15 cities in Asia and test for stationarity of the real exchange rate and speed of adjustment. We provide support for PPP in 63% of the cases. We also find that using individual prices lead to faster convergence of real rates toward their PPP values.

There is twofold contribution in this paper. First, by using monthly data for 16 industrialized countries for the period 1973–2011 we find evidence of time-varying cointegration relationship between effective exchange rates and national stock market indices. Second, we present that the cointegration relationship affects exchange rate exposure. We propose that the exchange rate exposure effect changes when the connection between the exchange rate and stock market emerges. This is a new result and reflects importance of these markets’ joint role in international risk sharing.

Negotiators from developed countries pushed hard for the inclusion of the TRIPS Agreement in the WTO set of agreements because it was viewed as a potentially effective method of coercing developing countries to strengthen their protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). We investigate whether the threat of cross-agreement retaliation, which could be authorized in disputes regarding the TRIPS Agreement, is effective in changing countries’ IPR protection regimes. The results from a panel empirical model suggest that both the TRIPS Agreement and the strength of trade ties with developed countries are important determinants of IPR protection regimes, but the vulnerability to potential trade losses through cross-agreement retaliation is not a uniformly significant determinant across geo-economic regions. These results extend beyond the TRIPS Agreement and highlight the potential ineffectiveness of the WTO’s retaliation mechanism as a coercive threat.

In this contribution we investigate upon the impact of the stocks of Italian outward FDI (in terms of employees of Italian foreign affiliates in the host markets and of the number of Italian foreign affiliates) on trade (national exports and imports). We employ a sector gravity analysis of Italian trade and FDI with the main partners to estimate a conditional correlation between domestic exports and foreign investment. To such a purpose we carry out a sectoral level analysis by aggregating data at firm level that allows a detailed analysis of the Italian FDI (ICE-Reprint). The sectoral panel we build on the basis of this firm level dataset includes 68 Italian host markets and 16 sectors during the 2001–2003 period. Our results do not confirm a substitution relationship of firm performances in terms of exports with respect to productive takeovers and employment in affiliates abroad.