GCF gross capital formation GNP gross national product N population r growth rate of GNP/N. After fitting this model to a cross section of 100 countries for 1966, they use the estimated coefficients to simulate a growth path of a typical economy. In this comment it will be shown that the simulation results depend critically on the quadratic sDecification of equation (1) .2 Although the estimation of equation (1) by Sommers and Suits gives satisfactory results, there is little empirical evidence for the declining range of the equation. This can easily be seen from the scatter diagram and the graph of the fitted equation (figure 1): GCF/GNP attains its maximum when GNP/N is $2,169. The sample, however, contains only 8 countries (out of 100) with a per capita income of more than $2,169. Except for the single case of the United States (GNP/N $3,763 and

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the theoretical and empirical literature on structural reforms in advanced economies. Structural reforms matter because they entail profound and systematic changes that affect economic welfare, productivity, growth, unemployment, macroeconomic stability, and income inequality. Here we focus on structural reforms in product, labor, and financial markets. After putting forward a set of stylized facts, we take stock of the literature on each of these three key structural reforms, and then assess their business cycle and political economy implications. We underscore various gaps in the literature and articulate a future research agenda that highlights four main areas: measurement, interactions among reforms, political economy considerations, and the timing of the implementation of reforms.

In this paper, we analyse the effectiveness of the direct central bank interventions using a new effectiveness criterion. To this aim, we investigate the effects of central bank interventions (CBI) in a noise trading model with chartists and fundamentalists. We first estimate a model in which chartists extrapolate past returns and fundamentalists forecast a mean reverting dynamics of the exchange rate towards a fundamental value. Then, we investigate the role of central bank interventions for explaining the switching properties between the two types of agents. We find evidence that in the medium run, interventions increase the proportion of fundamentalists and therefore exert some stabilizing influence on the exchange rate.