This Selected Issues paper for the Netherlands highlights that Dutch cost competitiveness deteriorated significantly in the years prior to 2004. The relatively poor economic performance during the new millennium contributed to these concerns generally, as did restrained export performance more...

The Selected Issues paper of the Netherlands provides an overview of the Dutch pension system. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of the existing bargaining model, compares the Dutch wage bargaining in different periods, examines the past macroeconomic performance of the Netherlands,...

The statistical data on indicators of tourism activity, estimated GDP and components, real GDP, contributions to real GDP growth, changes in the consumer price index, legal minimum wages, summary of trends in public finance, and tax revenue of Aruba are presented in the paper. The data on...

This 2002 Article IV Consultation highlights that the real GDP of the Netherlands is projected to rise by 1 percent in 2002, implying a return of growth to about 3 percent at an annual rate in the second half, and to rise by 3 percent in 2003. The pickup reflects an improvement in the worldwide...

This paper examines and compares the instruments and procedures currently employed by the central banks of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States for implementing monetary policy in the short run. The analysis indicates that the monetary authorities of these five...

We analyze labor market models where the law of one price does not hold-that is, models with equilibrium wage dispersion. We begin by assuming workers are ex ante heterogeneous, and highlight a flaw with this approach: if search is costly, the market shuts down. We then assume workers are...

Search models with posting and match-specific heterogeneity generate wage dispersion. Given K values for the match-specific variable, it is known that there are K reservation wages that could be posted, but generically never more than two actually are posted in equilibrium. What is unknown is...

Using Chilean data, we document that for resource-rich small open economies the effects of terms of trade shocks on the wage gap (between skilled and unskilled workers) depend on factor intensities in the non-tradable sector, following the model in Galiani, Heymann, and Magud (2010). For a...

Overall competitiveness of the Dutch economy seems adequate, but domestically produced exports have lost market share recently. Over the past three decades, globalization has greatly influenced economies as countries have become more integrated. Empirical studies on business cycles...

Strong macroeconomic foundations have so far largely shielded the Netherlands from recent financial turbulence. Despite a tightening labor market, inflation remains subdued. Employment has grown 11⁄4–11⁄2 percent in 2007, on par with the rest of the Euro area. The external current account...