One of the American Economic Association sessions in this year’s ASSA Meetings focused on “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) and (maybe somewhat unfairly in the same session) on last year’s presidential address by Olivier Blanchard, which suggested that persistently low interest rates on public debt render government budget constraints non-binding. Greg Mankiw concluded in his paper that “MMT contains some kernels of truth, but its most novel policy prescriptions do not follow cogently from...
Read More »Greek Debt Sustainability
The IMF’s debt sustainability analysis paints a bleak picture … about previous IMF assessments and about the prospects for Greece.
Read More »IMFx
Last year, the IMF has joined the MOOC movement. On edX, the online education platform founded by Harvard University and MIT, the IMF contributes a set of “IMFx” courses developed by its Institute for Capacity Development. Courses cover Debt sustainability analysis; Energy subsidy reform; and soon Financial programming and policies (analysis and program design) as well as Macroeconomic forecasting.
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