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The article explores the implications for gender roles and relations in Nicaragua of implementing a Conditional Cash Transfer programme aimed at improving the situation of the extreme poor. Nicaragua's programme, the Social Protection Network/Red de Protección Social (RPS), is modelled on the Progresa/Oportunidades programme of Mexico and shares many features in common. Evaluations of Progresa have suggested positive outcomes for women. However, examination of the findings highlight some cause for concern particularly around what inclusion on the programme means for the women involved. The article explores the consequences of translating this programme aimed at addressing the structural causes of poverty into a more overtly neoliberal and neo-conservative policy context such as that in Nicaragua. It highlights how a key feature of the RPS is the `social adjustment' of women's behaviour for economic growth gains and discusses the possible consequences for the women included and excluded from the programme.

Gross stocks of foreign assets have increased rapidly relative to national outputs since 1990, and the short-run capital gains and losses on those assets can amount to significant fractions of GDP. These fluctuations in asset values render the national income and product account measure of the current account balance increasingly inadequate as a summary of the change in a country's net foreign assets. Nonetheless, unusually large current account imbalances, especially deficits, should remain high on policymakers' list of concerns, even for the richer and less credit-constrained countries. Extreme imbalances signal the need for large and perhaps abrupt real exchange rate changes in the future, changes that might have undesired political and financial consequences given the incompleteness of domestic and international asset markets. Furthermore, of the two sources of the change in net foreign assets -- the current account and the capital gain on the net foreign asset position -- the former is better understood and more amenable to policy influence. Systematic government attempts to manipulate international asset values in order to change the net foreign asset position could have a destabilizing effect on market expectations.

AbstractThis paper provides a geometric analysis of asset adjustment behavior in response to changes in expected return and wealth. The analysis permits discussion of the role of different adjustment cost and risk attitude assumptions within a unified framework. It is shown that changes in expected return generally induce portfolio revision only if the marginal rate of substitution between assets is less than their relative marginal costs of adjustment. Wealth disturbances may induce sequential, rather than simultaneous, asset adjustment if marginal adjustment costs are constant or decreasing and the investor is risk neutral.

The paper analyzes the determinants of success of recent fiscal consolidations in the OECD countries as well as the short-run and long-run effects of fiscal adjustments on economic activity by looking at fourteen case studies, panel data for OECD countries, and the results of simulations using a non-Ricardian multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. The study finds that while fiscal consolidations tend to have short-run contractionary effects, they can be expansionary in the long run, provided that they do not rely excessively on cuts in productive government expenditure. They can also