Abstract:
Over the past decade, open economy macroeconomics has been broadened to encompass international lending and it has been deepened by microeconomic approaches to the role of money and the determinants of intertemporal resource allocation. The present paper offers a highly simplified model of trade in goods and money to explore the determinants of real interest rates and the price level in the world economy. The purpose of the paper is to set out the absolutely simplest model of the world economy where money and debt are held and traded so as to create foundations for the ambitious questions of welfare economics or risk that are now increasingly attracting attention.