Our analysis focuses on estimating the structural budget balance for the Romanian economy. This indicator is considered as one of the most relevant ones for estimation of the Romanian fiscal policy. The estimation provides the framework to analyze the characteristics of the fiscal policies in Romania and on their capacities to provide sustainable fiscal positions. We conclude that Romania has had an improper management of the macroeconomic policies. The procyclic fiscal policies resulted in creating a fiscal space during the recession gap periods and in its running short during the expansion gap periods. Romania has made large fiscal adjustments when the economy func
tioned below its potential, opposite to the postulates of the macroeconomic theory, which recom
mends fiscal consolidation processes during the expansion periods.

This paper examines the persistence of profit within Turkish banking system for the period 1998:1
2009:4 by focusing on both net income after tax to total assets (ROA) and net income after tax to total equity (ROE) as profit measures by utilizing panel LM unit root test. We found that competition among surviving banks is high within the Turkish banking system for the studied peri
od. When we compare ROA and ROE results in terms of persistence, competition is higher in Turkish banking system for ROE than for ROA.

This study takes the quantity of R&D input into consideration when discussing the relation of efficiency between input and output. From the results of data envelopment analysis (DEA), 58% of IC semiconductor industry is efficient in new product development. As a whole, the R&D efficiency in Taiwan's IC semiconductor industry is acceptable. In this industry, the efficient IC manufactur
ing takes up to 54%, DRAM industry claims 50%, IC design has 62.5%, and IC package and test
ing acquires 58%. IC design has comparably the highest R&D efficiency compared to DRAM, which has the lowest R&D efficiency. Reasons for achieving such efficiency are given and suggestions are made for new products development as well as for the academics.

Despite many companies across the globe are spending heavily on loyalty programs, many of them still fail to achieve the desired level customer of loyalty. This is often attributed to the fact that a lot of loyalty programs rely, almost exclusively, on monetary benefits, which are costly to a com
pany. A recent trend in research and managerial practice is to explore the conditions under which rewards that provide psychological benefits can be successfully adopted.

The paper investigates 3 decades of the long
run equilibrium relationship and Granger causality between foreign exchange reserves and external debt of the EMEs which are at different levels of financial development. The results of the bounds test for cointegration within the ARDL modeling approach of Pesaran et al. (2001) depict the long
run equilibrium relationship between foreign exchange reserves and external debt of the concerned EMEs. The Granger causality analyses under VEC and VAR models demonstrate that reserves stockpiling may increase external debt in countries with low financial development level. This result reveals that Asian and Latin
American EMEs with low levels of financial development should firstly develop their financial markets.

When exchange rates are used as anchors of monetary policy, is there a "credit channel" mechanism operating through international financial markets amplifying bank lending? We observe that private sector credit tends to increase after episodes of exchange rate pegging and we ask whether this effect is more pronounced than standard macroeconomic theory would lead to expect. We conjecture that an "international credit channel" might be operating and we analyze how spreads between domestic and foreign interest rates impact domestic crediting and whether "balance sheet effects" are transmitted through the exchange rate policy. Using panel data for 128 countries from 1970 to 2000, we analyze the behavior of main financial aggregates and of interest rates around 125 episodes of exchange rate stabilization and show that spreads between domestic and foreign interest rates as well as the real effective exchange rate are affected by the policy switch. Our findings are supportive of the significant impact of an "international credit channel" on banks domestic lending decisions.

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous boom at the Pakistani equity market followed by a sudden meltdown. By employing the univariate time series analysis and duration dependence test (DDT) (McQueen and Thorley, 1994) over the weekly return data of KSE
100 index for the peri
od from 1999 to 2008 this study investigates whether this boom was fundamentally driven or steered by rational speculative bubbles. All 3 tests – ADF, PP and KPSS – characterize the returns' series
to be of I(1). The returns' distribution of KSE
100 index is negatively skewed, leptokurtic and non
normal as reflected by the significant Jarquе
Bera statistics. The results of DDT also support the presence of rational speculative bubbles in both the log
logistic and the Weibull hazard models.

This article focuses on the importance of tourism by investigating the relationship between tourist arrivals and the tourism share in economic growth. The findings are consistent with the lit
erature on tourism. Tourist arrivals have positive impact on economic growth. We also find that bilateral trade and investment output are determinants of economic growth. This paper specifies static and dynamic panel models for the period of 1995
2008 between Portugal and 20 partners. We apply the dynamic panel models to observe serial correlation and the endogeneity of some explanatory variables.