This Selected Issues paper on Portugal reviews a set of issues of relevance to the regime change implied by European Monetary Union participation. It presents an empirical investigation of the business cycle in Portugal. The paper attempts to obtain a quantitative sense of the impact of monetary policy on the Portuguese economy, utilizing an unrestricted vector autoregression methodology to characterize the monetary transmission mechanism. It also examines some key forces at work in Portugal’s external sector from different vantage points.

This 2005 Article IV Consultation highlights that economic activity in Germany is slowly picking up, and there is scope for some further firming of growth in the course of 2006. The recovery, however, remains unbalanced, and strong exports have yet to feed through into higher household spending. Although the risks to the outlook are broadly neutral, an unwinding of global imbalances and higher oil prices could yet provide headwinds for the recovery. On balance, headline growth is forecast at 1 percent in 2005 and 1.5 percent in 2006, implying a gradual recovery in working-day-adjusted terms.

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

This paper discusses the economic performance of Germany. The economy of Germany is projected to slowly rebalance, with domestic demand supported by tight labor market, accommodative monetary conditions, and, in 2016, a fiscal expansion. Declining medium-term growth prospects, however, continue to hold back domestic investment and push up savings, preventing faster rebalancing. Progress has been slow on addressing needs in public infrastructure and stimulating competition in services sector, while mounting aging costs and a successful labor market integration of women and refugees require further policy action. Full use of the room available under fiscal rules to finance additional public investment and growth-friendly structural reforms would be appropriate.

Switzerland: Selected Issues

Japan: Selected Issues

New Zealand: Selected Issues

This book is both a reference book on Germany's financial system and a contribution to the economic debate about its status at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In giving a comprehensive account of the many facets of the system, it covers corporate governance, relationship lending, stock market development, investor protection, the venture capital industry, and the accounting system, and reports on monetary transmission and the credit channel, regulation and banking competition, the insurance and investment industry, and mergers and acquisitions. Special chapters at the beginning and at the end of the book adopt the financial system perspective, analysing the mutual fit of different features of the financial system; and each of the fifteen chapters addresses particular myths that surround it. The book is invaluable for those who want to understand the German economy and its financial system, promising not only a compilation of facts and statistics on Germany's financial markets and institutions, but also an analysis of its current structure and the determinants of its future development.