The New Open Economy Macroeconomics: A Critical Appraisal

Within only a few years, the new open economy macroeconomics (NOEM) has emerged as a potential rival to the Mundell-Fleming framework, as modified by Dornbusch and others in the 1980s and 1990s using linear-quadratic models, as the dominant analytical framework in the study of open economies. This paper reviews some of the main developments in this literature. It offers a critical appraisal of its contributions to date and discusses potential pitfalls of taking a pure NOEM approach by dismissing work not based in explicit utility maximization as "ad hoc." The paper proposes broadening the NOEM literature to include consideration of heterogeneities within and across open economies. In light of the complexities involved in modeling heterogeneous agents or structures, the field of open economy macroeconomics may stand to gain from the pursuit of an impure NOEM. Work along these lines would de-emphasize dynamics, general equilibrium, and explicit optimization in favor of a focus on the true innovation of the NOEM literature, which has been highlighting the crucial importance of accounting for imperfect competition and price and wage rigidities in macroeconomic theories of open economies.