This paper analyses the prerequisites, milestones and consequences of the economic crisis in Ireland in 2008-2013. Economic growth of the Celtic Tiger in 1987-2007 was accompanied by increasing wages and low credit rates, which ultimately led to the economic overheating. The debt crisis in Europe worsened Ireland’s situation and raised the scale of financial and economic crisis showed in a form of mortgage, fiscal and banking crisis as well as rising unemployment and immigration.

Weak potential growth has sustained as the key challenge for Belarusian economy. In 2014, there has not been any substantial progress in this field, although the government declared a start in a preparatory stage for structural reforms. In current macroeconomic policy, the regime of exchange rate targeting has been preserved as the core element.

The development of a private sector and the expansion of its role in the economy is one of the key goals repeatedly announced by the Belarusian authorities. The reforms carried out in Belarus in 2006-2014 moved the country from 106th to 57th position in the World Bank Doing Business ranking. The official statement is that reforms boosted the rapid development of business initiatives and its impact on economic development.

This policy paper deals with the phenomena of dollarization and prospects of de-dollarization policies in Belarus. During last two decades Belarus has been a highly dollarized economy. Recently, the authorities declared a campaign of de-dollarization, which, however, focuses mainly on de-dollarization of payments. Such a policy is unlikely to become effective.

Belarus currently has a relatively generous pay-as-you-go pension system, but population aging coupled with recent problems with economic growth will soon make it unsustainable. We build a rich OLG model of Belarusian economy, which shows that without reform the Pension Fund will run into persistent and growing deficit, which will reach 9 per cent of GDP by 2055. We also compute the fiscal projections of several parametric pension reforms.

The paper analyzes the short-run and long-run effects of imports of intermediate and capital goods on Belarusian economic growth for the period 2005 to 2015 taking into account large upward and downward exchange rate adjustments of Belarusian ruble. The empirical findings from the autoregressive distributed lag regressions indicate that there are negative effects of imports of intermediate goods on economic growth both in the short and long run. Second, contrary to the theory devaluation of the Belarusian ruble negatively influences both GDP growth and imports of intermediate goods in Belarus. Third, the results of Toda–Yamamoto causality test shows that GDP growth Granger causes growth in imports and exports, supporting the hypothesis that trade is more a consequence of the rapid economic growth in Belarus than a cause. Fourth, the findings from forecast error variance decomposition (VDC) confirm results obtained from TY causality test and additionally emphasize that changes in imports in Belarus are mostly driven by changes in exports especially in the long-run. Finally, the findings from VDC also indicate that the main contributor to growth fluctuations are domestic capital investments.