The Centre which is located in the Department of Economics was established by a decision of the Senate of the University of Surrey in late 1992. Essentially SCIES provides a focus for bringing together members of staff who have a research interest in international economic issues. The activities of SCIES are described as follows:
• To act as a centre for research into international economic studies and to provide a framework for raising research funding.
• To produce research output in the form of refereed journal articles and research monographs.
• To produce a regular series of discussion papers written by members of staff and affiliates of the Centre.
• To provide a research environment for Visiting Academics and Visiting Scholars.
• To encourage and facilitate the recruitment of well-qualified research students.
• To build an institutional network of links with research centres in the UK and abroad and to organise exchange visits.
• To build trans-departmental links within the University with people who have related research interests.
• To run a programme of seminars, workshops and conferences.
Themes
Although covering quite a wide range of specific topics, research conducted by members of SCIES has tended to focus on two broad themes, international development and macroeconomic policy within a global economic environment. In both areas resaerch explores the synergies between theoretical analysis and applied investigation, and takes full account of the institutional framework within which policy is formulated.
International Development
Recent research in international development has covered inter alia: capital flows to developing countries and capital volatility; the links between budgetary imbalances and crises in foreign exchange (FX) markets, international spillover mechanisms of FX pressures, operations and governance of the IMF and its dealings with both low income countries and emerging economies; the interaction between private and official external finance for developing countries; policies relating to international reserve accumulation, the relationship between foreign aid and debt relief, particularly in Africa; the macroeconomics of the ‘scaling up' of foreign aid (again with particular reference to Africa), and the political economy of exchange rate policy in developing countries and emerging economies.
Macroeconomic Policy
Recent research in macroeconomic policy focuses on open-economy macro-modelling and monetary - fiscal policy issues. Topics covered have included inter alia: dynamic general equilibrium macro-modeling, optimal monetary and fiscal policy, international policy coordination, the economics of committees with application to monetary policy, model solution methods and software development, notably the internationally recognised pachage WinSolve. Empirical aspects of this work include: GMM estimation of micro-based Phillips curves and policy rules, a comparison of GMM and Bayesian-maximum likelihood estimation of DSGE models, the international transmission mechanism, and various applications of time series econometrics.