Working Papers
2024
April 5, 2024
How Vulnerable is Sub-Saharan Africa to Geoeconomic Fragmentation?
Description: This paper studies the potential effects of geoeconomic fragmentation (GEF) in the sub-Saharan Africa region (SSA) through quantifying potential long-term economic costs. The paper considers two alternative GEF scenarios in which trade relations are fully or partially curtailed across world economies. Our quantification relies on a multi-country multi-sector general equilibrium model and takes a deep dive into the impact across SSA’s oil-rich, other resource-rich and non-resource-rich countries. The results are based on a detailed dataset including information for 136 tradable primary commodity and 24 manufacturing and services sectors in 145 countries—32 of which are in SSA. We find that under GEF, SSA could experience long-term wellfare losses of approximately 4 percent of GDP, twice the losses of the rest of the world. This strong effect results from the large losses of other resource-rich and non-resource rich countries in SSA, given their high dependence on commodity trade. However, if the world experiences a less severe GEF-induced trade disruption—a strategic decoupling—SSA countries could derive minor gains from the re-shuffling of global market supply, specially in energy products.
April 5, 2024
Unveiling the Dance of Commodity Prices and the Global Financial Cycle
Description: We examine the impact of commodity price changes on the business cycles and capital flows in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), distinguishing between their role as a source of shock and as a channel of transmission of global shocks. Our findings reveal that surges in export prices, triggered by commodity price shocks, boost domestic GDP, an effect further amplified by the endogenous decline of country spreads. However, the effects on capital flows appear muted. Shifts in U.S. monetary policy and global risk appetite drive the global financial cycle in EMDEs. Eased global credit conditions, attributed to looser U.S. monetary policy or lower global risk appetite, lead to a rise in export prices, higher output, a decrease in government borrowing costs, and stimulate greater capital flows. The endogenous response of export prices amplifies the output effects of a more accommodative U.S. monetary policy while country spreads magnify the impact of shifts in global risk appetite.
March 29, 2024
Trade in Low Carbon Technologies: The Role of Climate and Trade Policies
Description: Curbing carbon emissions to meet the targets set in the Paris Agreement requires the deployment of low carbon technologies (LCTs) at a global scale. This paper assesses the role of climate and trade policies in fostering LCT diffusion through trade. Leveraging a comprehensive database of climate policies and a new database identifying trade in low carbon technologies and the tariffs applied to these goods, this paper shows that the introduction of new climate policies has a positive and significant impact on LCT imports. Zooming into specific climate policies, the paper finds that, except for non-binding ones, all climate policies stimulate LCT imports. The paper also highlights the role of trade policies as an engine of LCT diffusion—reductions in tariffs applied on LCT goods have a sizeable impact on LCT imports. On the flip side, results suggest that more protectionist measures would impede the spread of low-carbon technologies.
March 29, 2024
Call of Duty: Industrial Policy for the Post-Oil Era
Description: Oil-exporting economies face the risk of an acceleration in the energy transition. A risk-based approach calls for urgent preparation for the post-oil era by diversifying exports and transforming the prevailing growth model. We outline the principles of industrial policy to achieve this objective based on the experience of the Asian Miracles and propose a sketch of the strategy required to transform these principles into practice. The key component of the strategy is to select sectors along two dimensions—proximity to the current production structure or capabilities set and a timeframe for results to materialize. The three strategies—snail crawl, leapfrogging, and moonshots—determine how far from the current production structure the selected sectors are. These sectors need to show results both in the short run to jumpstart growth and ensure policy continuity—“quick wins”—and the long run to create a new growth model—“transformative gains.” We argue that the strategy should focus on supporting the exports of sophisticated sectors in both manufacturing and services while capitalizing on complex tasks and activities in existing industries but should leave non-sophisticated sectors such as tourism and non-tradable services to the private sector.
March 29, 2024
Central Bank Exit Strategies Domestic Transmission and International Spillovers
Description: We study alternative approaches to the withdrawal of prolonged unconventional monetary stimulus (“exit strategies”) by central banks in large, advanced economies. We first show empirically that large-scale asset purchases affect the exchange rate and domestic and foreign term premiums more strongly than conventional short-term policy rate changes when normalizing by the effects on domestic GDP. We then build a two-country New Keynesian model that features segmented bond markets, cognitive discounting and strategic complementarities in price setting that is consistent with these findings. The model implies that quantitative easing (QE) is the only effective way to provide monetary stimulus when policy rates are persistently constrained by the effective lower bound, and that QE is likely to have larger domestic output effects than quantitative tightening (QT). We demonstrate that “exit strategies” by large advanced economies that rely heavily on QT can trigger sizeable inflation-output tradeoffs in foreign recipient economies through the exchange rate and term premium channels. We also show that these tradeoffs are likely to be stronger in emerging market economies, especially those with fixed exchange rates.
March 29, 2024
The Riskiness of Credit Origins and Downside Risks to Economic Activity
Description: We construct a country-level indicator capturing the extent to which aggregate bank credit growth originates from banks with a relatively riskier profile, which we label the Riskiness of Credit Origins (RCO). Using bank-level data from 42 countries over more than two decades, we document that RCO variations over time are a feature of the credit cycle. RCO also robustly predicts downside risks to GDP growth even after controlling for aggregate bank credit growth and financial conditions, among other determinants. RCO’s explanatory power comes from its relationship with asset quality, investor and banking sector sentiment, as well as future banking sector resilience. Our findings underscore the importance of bank heterogeneity for theories of the credit cycle and financial stability policy.
March 29, 2024
Public Debt Dynamics During the Climate Transition
Description: Managing the climate transition presents policymakers with a tradeoff between achieving climate goals, fiscal sustainability, and political feasibility, which calls for a fiscal balancing act with the right mix of policies. This paper develops a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify the fiscal impacts of various climate policy packages aimed at reaching net zero emissions by mid-century. Our simulations show that relying primarily on spending measures to deliver on climate ambitions will be costly, possibly raising debt by 45-50 percent of GDP by 2050. However, a balanced mix of carbon-pricing and spending-based policies can deliver on net zero with a much smaller fiscal cost, limiting the increase in public debt to 10-15 percent of GDP by 2050. Carbon pricing is central not only as an effective tool for emissions reduction but also as a revenue source. Delaying carbon pricing action could increase costs, especially if less effective measures are scaled up to meet climate targets. Technology spillovers can reduce the costs but bottlenecks in green investment could unwind the gains and slow the transition.
March 29, 2024
Mobile Internet, Collateral, and Banking
Description: Combining administrative data on credit, internet penetration and a land reform in Rwanda, this paper shows that the complementarity between technology and law can overcome financial frictions. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation in 3G availability from lightning strikes and incidental coverage, we show that mobile connectivity steers borrowers from microfinance to commercial banks and improves loan terms. These effects are partly due to the role of 3G internet in facilitating the acquisition of land titles from the reform, used as a collateral for bank loans and mortgages. We quantify that the collateral's availability mediates 35% of the overall effect of mobile internet on credit and 80% for collateralized loans.
March 29, 2024
E-Money and Monetary Policy Transmission
Description: E-money development has important yet theoretically ambiguous consequences for monetary policy transmission, because nonbank deposit-taking e-money issuers (EMIs) (e.g., mobile network operators) can either complement or substitute banks. Case studies of e-money regulations point to complementarity of EMIs with banks, implying that the development of e-money could deepen financial intermediation and strengthen monetary policy transmission. The issue is further explored with panel data, on both monthly (covering 21 countries) and annual (covering 47 countries) frequencies, over 2001 to 2019. We use a two-way fixed effect estimator to estimate the causal effects of e-money development on monetary policy transmission. We find that e-money development has accompanied stronger monetary policy transmission (measured by the responsiveness of interest rates to the policy rate), growth in bank deposits and credit, and efficiency gains in financial intermediation (measured by the lending-to-deposit rate spread). Evidence is more pronounced in countries where e-money development takes off in a context of limited financial inclusion. This paper highlights the potential benefits of e-money development in strengthening monetary policy transmission, especially in countries with limited financial inclusion.
March 22, 2024
A Proposal to Improve Country-Level Data on Total Factor Productivity Growth
Description: The assumption behind popular data on national capital stocks, and therefore total factor productivity, is that countries were in a steady state in the first year that investment data became available. This paper argues that this assumption is highly implausible and is necessarily responsible for implausible data on the ratio of capital to output and productivity growth. It is not credible that countries with similar incomes had huge differences in their capital stocks. This paper claims, with evidence, that implausible features of the data can be greatly reduced by using data on electricity usage or national stocks of road vehicles.