Bulletin April 2008

IN THIS ISSUE...

Central bank forecasts: publish and be damned?
There have been growing calls for central banks to publish forecasts of how they expect interest rates to move, so that firms and households can adjust their behaviour accordingly.

Doing the best they can?
With hindsight, governments' tax and spending policies can often be seen to have made a bad situation worse - by fuelling an economic boom, or exacerbating a downturn. As a result, politicians are frequently accused of using fiscal policy irresponsibly. But even the most virtuous policymakers can only act on the information they have at the time, and a new CEPR paper shows that in many cases, decision-makers are simply misinformed, rather than irresponsible.

Immigration: the real losers
When a wave of new immigrants arrives to seek a new life, native workers often feel under threat, fearing that their jobs and livelihoods will be jeopardised by the influx of rivals. But a new paper from CEPR suggests that instead of the local-born workforce, it is earlier waves of immigrants who should feel most at risk.

Is best pratice alwasy best?
Encouraging developing countries to learn from many decades worth of experience from elsewhere in the world may seem to be an obviously good idea, but a new CEPR paper argues that spreading what the IMF, World Bank and other multilateral institutions call 'best practice' can be unhelpful, and even damaging. Sometimes, second-best may actually be better.