This volume brings together several of the most important research papers on the monetary approach to the balance of payments prepared by IMF staff members. The 11 papers record, the contribution ...made by the IMF's staff to the development of the monetary approach, which is now widely accepted by academic economists and policymakers alike.
Learning for Jobs is an OECD study of vocational education and training (VET) designed to help countries make their VET systems more responsive to labour market needs.The Czech Republic has done much ...to improve its VET system through the introduction of a new qualification system and a national standardised exam in apprenticeship programmes, among other initiatives. The Czech VET system is supported by an impressive date base on labour market outcomes of education and training. At the same time, the general skills of apprenticeship graduates are poor and their situation in the labour market is fragile. Students also need better information about career choices, and the provision of workplace training is highly variable.The OECD review assesses the main challenges faced by the VET system and presents an interconnected package of policy recommendations. For each recommendation, the report describes the challenge, the recommendation itself, supporting arguments, and issues of implementation.
The forced overthrow of the historic meter of commercial development, the monetary Gold Standard, as adopted originally in the USA on the first of August 1914’s, triggered, and led during the next ...decade, the great inflations in France, Germany, Russia and almost all other European Countries. The ensuing convulsions of the social order, the rise of the speculator opportunities, the obliteration of the savings of the laboring and middle classes, based on fixed incomes, produced directly and afterwards, the rise of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism. They were follow-ups of the floating European currencies, perennial budgetary and balance of payments deficits, Central banks’ emergency money printing, currency wars and the neo-mercantilism practices.
After Nixon 15 August 1971 second American repudiation of the new Gold Exchange Standard, we entered a slow replay of the first experience, trough inflation, large monetary quantitative expansions and, through bursting bubbles, recessions and stagnations and, finally, new consequent barriers and tariffs perspectives. The most relevant comment, I always share in my speeches is this, coming from a statement on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques Rueff. The comment address has been formulated by Lewis E. Lehrman, at the parliament of France (Assemble Nationale), on November 7, 1996: “Money will decide the fate of mankind, because individual liberty is only possible - or even thinkable - when confined within the boundaries of a collective discipline, calculated to curb the disorders that uncontrolled action is bound to provoke”. (Rueff, 1971).
This paper aims to illustrate how an equilibrium exchange rate of the Yuan would contribute to China's achievement of non-inflationary full employment -- defined as internal balance by James Meade in ...1951, as well as the balance of international payments. In terms of Meade's model, China currently has both excess demand and a payments surplus, so that it would benefit from revaluation, which helps curb internal inflation and the external foreign surplus simultaneously. For China, specifically, revaluation would support combating price increases and facilitate a shift of resources into consumption and raising living standards. The paper also examines three common reasons advanced by groups in favor of avoiding appreciation of the RMB, finding none of them theoretically or empirically convincing. The pursuit of both growth/employment and price stability objectives makes China unable to afford having an undervalued exchange rate. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
We compare the long-term output and current account effects of pension reforms that increase the retirement age with those of reforms that cut pension benefits, conditional on reforms achieving ...similar fiscal targets. We show the presence of a policy trade-off. Pension reforms that increase the retirement age have a large positive effect on output, but a small (and often negative) effect on the current account. In contrast, reforms that cut pension benefits improve the current account balance but reduce output. Mixed pension reforms, which extend the working life and cut pension benefits, can simultaneously boost output and the current account.
MONEY, MARKETS AND MEN Pines, Mario
Zbornik radova Ekonomskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Mostaru,
01/2018
Special Issue 2017.
Conference Proceeding
Open access
According to a common recurring analysis approach, most studies have defined the present external and universal internal deficit crisis, as the result of a wrong financial deregulation appearing in ...most modern financial markets. Speculation pressures, relaxing policies, monitoring over banks capital and bank governance models, seem as paying a widespread role as well. On the contrary, some historical and present new behavioral viewpoints show a uniform result of new general widespread monetary mismanagement attitudes, in a global new monetary perspective. Both Western financial markets and the new European single currency creation are showing same surfacing effects, which are generally large internal national deficits, huge trade imbalances and growing unemployment rates.
The general market collapses that occurred up to the last 2008 unexpected monetary disintegration, considered firstly as the logical final effect of deep systematic crisis, as never before interlinked during the the twentieth century, has brought to a confused and contradictory row of financial irrecoverable shocks. Stemming from the monetary dissolution materialized during the First World War and never recovered, but for the short Bretton Woods interlude, the international and most of national payment systems are nowadays in a liquidity, interest rates and severe taxation single trap.
My firm belief is that what happened at the end of the last century is not the consequence of some specific well-defined deregulation or mismanagement of financial institutions and markets, neither a structural collapse of some previous deteriorated model, or a cyclical evolving of market tendencies. On the contrary, what surfaced from September 1987 to August 2008 and after, has been as well unfolding up to now as an unavoidable effect of the single monetary secular debasement and unproductive and inefficient macroeconomic policies and the disregard of minor welfare and micro-economic frontiers and boundaries inconsistent in a fast enlarging competitive world.
In 2016, the 1987-2008 global financial bubbles, from peripheral defaults or market plunges, has become the “final euro crisis." As well, the 19 countries of the EMS, issuing the single euro currency, apart from symptoms of economic stagnation and useless recurring monetary policies, acknowledged internal and external huge rigid trade unbalances. Some countries have been sliding into deficits for years, while the governing powers of the Eurozone have intervened from emergency to emergency, most deeply in Greece. In the Euro contest, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz (Stiglitz, 2016) has been dismantling the first hour prevailing consensus around, which affected Europe, demolishing the stronghold of austerity, and has been offering a series of discussible plans that could rescue the continent and the related parties from further depression.
Concern about unsustainable payments imbalances in the global economy has prompted renewed interest in international monetary reform. This paper describes and evaluates six reform proposals that ...focus on strengthening the institutional framework for the current system. Some of these proposals advocate increased surveillance; others would create new instruments or facilities; still others propose an evolutionary path toward a new, nonnational reserve or transactions currency. But none of the proposals confront the problems posed by the changes that resulted from the privatization of the international monetary system after the collapse of the gold/dollar exchange standard. The paper argues that a new institutional structure is needed to promote stability and balance by rebuilding a channel for balance-of-payments settlements managed by authorities that represent public rather than private interests.
International financial crises in the late 1990s revealed that deficiencies in countries' international reserves and related information made it difficult to anticipate and respond to crises by ...obscuring financial weaknesses and imbalances. This volume sets forth an innovative framework to assess countries' international reserves and foreign currency liquidity. The framework takes account of official balance sheet and off-balance-sheet financial activities, future and potential demand for foreign exchange to meet official obligations, the availability of official foreign currency assets to meet such demand, and official risk exposure to exchange rate fluctuations. This work clarifies what international reserves are, and how international reserves and related information should be strengthened to promote informed decision making in the public and private sectors, thereby helping improve the functioning of global financial markets.
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