Working Papers
2024
September 6, 2024
Managing Remittances Inflows with Foreign Exchange Intervention
Description: In a 157 emerging markets and developing countries sample, remittances continue to grow fast, outpacing other financial inflows (as a share of GDP), particularly in Asia. Without alternative policy instruments, foreign exchange interventions (FXIs) have often been the authorities’ go-to tool to manage the short-term effects of these remittance inflows. However, this practice comes at a cost. This paper shows that FXIs are quick, temporary solutions that often may hinder the development of the recipient country’s financial sector and may not support financial stability over the medium term. The analysis suggests that FXIs act as an insurance tool that, by mitigating FX volatility, protect remittance recipients and tradable sectors from FX risks, encouraging less bank deposits (consistent with more spending) and lower buffers in the banking sector. These costs add to other direct FXI-related costs already identified in the literature. The development of private sector market risk management tools should support longer-term structural reforms required to increase the absorptive capacity of additional FX inflows.
September 6, 2024
Regime-Switching Factor Models and Nowcasting with Big Data
Description: This paper shows that the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for regime-switching dynamic factor models provides satisfactory performance relative to other estimation methods and delivers a good trade-off between accuracy and speed, which makes it especially useful for large dimensional data. Unlike traditional numerical maximization approaches, this methodology benefits from closed-form solutions for parameter estimation, enhancing its practicality for real-time applications and historical data exercises with focus on frequent updates. In a nowcasting application to vintage US data, I study the information content and relative performance of regime-switching model after each data releases in a fifteen year period, which was only feasible due to the time efficiency of the proposed estimation methodology. While existing literature has already acknowledged the performance improvement of nowcasting models under regime-switching, this paper shows that the superior nowcasting performance observed particularly when key economic indicators are released. In a backcasting exercise, I show that the model can closely match the recession starting and ending dates of the NBER despite having less information than actual committee meetings, where the fit between actual dates and model estimates becomes more apparent with the additional available information and recession end dates are fully covered with a lag of three to six months. Given that the EM algorithm proposed in this paper is suitable for various regime-switching configurations, this paper provides economists and policymakers with a valuable tool for conducting comprehensive analyses, ranging from point estimates to information decomposition and persistence of recessions in larger datasets.
September 6, 2024
Geopolitical Proximity and the Use of Global Currencies
Description: After decades of increasing global economic integration, the world is facing a growing risk of geoeconomic fragmentation, with potentially far-reaching implications for the global economy and the international monetary system. Against this background, this paper studies how geopolitical proximity, along with other economic factors, affects the usage of five SDR currencies in cross-border transactions. Since World War II, the global currency landscape has remained relatively stable, with the U.S. dollar serving as the dominant currency. Using country-level SWIFT transaction data, our analysis confirms the importance of inertia, trade and financial linkages in shaping the currency landscape, consistent with existing studies. On geopolitical proximity, we find that closer proximity can boost the use of the euro and renminbi, notably among emerging market and developing economies, although the impact is rather muted in the full sample. The effect on RMB usage in the full sample is more pronounced during periods of heightened trade policy uncertainty. These findings suggest that in a more geoeconomically fragmented world, alternative currencies could play a greater role.
September 6, 2024
How do Economic Growth and Food Inflation Affect Food Insecurity?
Description: During the global recession of 2020 food insecurity increased substantially in many countries around the world. Fortunately, the surge in food insecurity quickly came to a halt as the world economy returned to its positive growth path, despite double-digit domestic food inflation in most countries. To shed light on the relative importance of income growth and food inflation in driving food insecurity, we employ a heterogeneous-agent model with income inequality, complemented by novel cross-country data for the period 2001-2021. We use external instruments (changes in commodity terms-of-trade, external economic growth, and harvest shocks) to isolate exogenous variation in domestic income growth and ood inflation. Our findings suggest that income growth is the dominant driver of annual variations in food insecurity, while food price inflation plays a somewhat smaller role, aligning with our model predictions.
August 30, 2024
Overview of the New Calibrated DSGE Model of the Economy of North Macedonia
Description: This paper presents a calibrated DSGE model of the economy of North Macedonia that was developed at the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia (NBRNM) within a technical assistance project delivered jointly by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Czech National Bank (CNB). The model structure reflects the specific characteristics of the economy of North Macedonia. Namely, it is a small open economy DSGE model featuring a fixed exchange rate regime functioning in an economy experiencing structural changes over time. The paper provides a detailed overview of the theoretical structure of the model, including optimization problems of economic agents and first-order optimality conditions. A particular emphasis is put on model calibration, as well as on model evaluation, including the analysis of impulse responses, shock decompositions and historical in-sample simulation. Compared to other empirical papers focusing on DSGE models, our approach explicitly includes additional trends and wedges needed to capture non-stationary great ratios as well as the Balassa-Samuelson effect. The model has been developed to complement the existing analytic tools used at the NBRNM for policy analyses and to improve the understanding of the underlying drivers of the business cycle of the domestic economy.
August 30, 2024
Currencies in Turbulence: Exploring the Impact of Natural Disasters on Exchange Rates
Description: This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on exchange rate movements in different country groups with different exchange rate regimes. Using a panel local projection model with a high-frequency monthly dataset of 177 countries during 1970M1-2019M12, we find that exchange rate movements are more sensitive to natural disasters in emerging markets and developing countries (EMDEs) than in advanced economies (AEs). Furthermore, exchange rate reactions to natural shocks depend on exchange rate regimes adopted by EMDEs. On average, both nominal and real exchange rates could depreciate up to 6 percents two years after the disasters in non-pegged regimes. Our findings suggest that EMDEs with flexible exchange rate regimes would observe a faster recovery through nominal and real depreciations, although they should be mindful about policy implications that may arise from large exchange rate fluctuations caused by natural disaster shocks.
August 30, 2024
Changing Climate in Brazil: Key Vulnerabilities and Opportunities
Description: This paper assesses the Brazilian economy's exposure to climate change focusing on two key areas: agriculture and hydropower. While climate vulnerabilities are significant and recent patterns of land-use further amplify climate change risk, Brazil's opportunities for green growth are vast. Given geography and existing infrastructure, notably the very green energy mix, Brazil can boost its economic potential while mitigating a potential tradeoff between energy use, emissions, and growth. Policy options to address key vulnerabilities and leverage opportunities include boosting the Amazon's resilience via fiscal incentives for forest protection, investing in climate smart agriculture and insurance guided by sustainable feebates, continuing the diversification of renewable power generation, and stimulating green growth while greening the financial sector.
August 23, 2024
Investing in Climate Adaptation under Trade and Financing Constraints: Balanced Strategies for Food Security
Description: Financially constrained governments, particularly in emerging and developing economies, tend to face a fiscal trade-off between adapting to climate change impacts and pursuing broader development goals. This trade-off is especially relevant in the agriculture sector, where investing in adaptation is critical to ensure food security amidst climate change. International trade can help alleviate this challenge and reduce adaptation investment needs by offsetting agricultural production shortages. However, in the presence of trade fragmentation, the adaptive role of trade diminishes, exacerbating food insecurity and increasing investment needs for adaptation. In this paper, we present a model to guide policymakers in deciding on the cost-efficient balance between investing in adaptation in the agricultural sector versus in broader development under financing and trade constraints. We apply the model to Ghana, Egypt, and Brazil, to examine the adaptation-development trade-off and highlight factors that would potentially lower adaptation investment needs. These factors include trade openness, higher agricultural productivity and efficiency of adaptation spending, and reduced labor market distortions. The key takeaways from the model applications suggest that (i) promoting trade openness and accessing concessional finance for adaptation help tackle climate challenges and ensure food security in lower-income countries; and (ii) domestic structural reforms are necessary to facilitate adaptation investments and reduce investment needs, by improving labor market flexibility, adaptation efficiency, and agriculture productivity.
August 23, 2024
Financial and Business Cycles: Shall We Dance?: An Application to Kazakhstan
Description: This paper examines the role of financial cycle proxies in refining available estimates of the business cycle in Kazakhstan. It contributes to the existing literature by introducing a formal test for the stability of the mean of exogenous variables in the estimation set up, and by developing a self-contained statistical package to streamline the whole estimation process. The empirical strategy is designed to be parsimonious, aiming to avoid the pitfalls associated with overly complex models while achieving comparable results. Results have implications for the extent with which the authorities should manage the business and financial cycles, with which policies, for macroprudential policy calibration, and for the usefulness for policymaking of endsample estimates of the cycle.
August 23, 2024
Taming Public Debt in Europe: Outlook, Challenges, and Policy Response
Description: Public debt ratios in Europe increased significantly in response to the pandemic and energy shocks and have remained higher than before the pandemic in most countries. Going forward, the projected public debt trajectories are broadly flat overall in advanced Europe but have a rising profile in emerging Europe. Government financing needs are still elevated, and the unwinding of quantitative easing by major central banks adds to financing pressures. Moreover, there are important medium- to long-term spending pressures from defense, climate transition, and aging, which are not fully reflected in the projected baseline trajectories. Against this backdrop, the risk that debts will not stabilize in the medium term has increased. Debt stabilization will hinge critically on achieving ambitious fiscal consolidation and sustained growth. Facing these elevated risks, policymakers need to implement carefully-calibrated fiscal adjustments that ensure debt sustainability while supporting growth. They could target debt stabilization over a longer, 10-year, horizon—while adhering to credible fiscal rules such as the reformed EU Economic Governance Framework—but with a high probability to reassure markets that debts will indeed be tamed.