Working Papers
2023
October 27, 2023
Social Unrests and Fuel Prices: The Role of Macroeconomic, Social and Institutional Factors
Description: This paper investigates the impact of fuel price increases on social unrests in addition to the macroeconomic, social and institutional factors driving this relationship. Using the IV fixed-effect estimator on a sample of 101 developing countries during 2001-2020, we find that changes in fuel prices are positively associated with the number of social unrests, mainly anti-government demonstrations. This impact is however amplified: (i) during economic downturns and periods of high exchange rate instability; (ii) when government spending is low, especially on health and education, thus suggesting that streamlining fuel subsides and diverting parts of the reform savings to the health and education sectors is an appropriate policy that could appease social tensions; (iii) in countries with high income inequality, low institutional quality and high level of corruption. The results are robust to a battery of tests, including the use of an instrumental variable approach to address reverse causality concerns given that social unrests could also prompt a freeze in fuel prices. We also find consistent results using either changes in diesel or gasoline prices. Overall, the findings of the paper provide support to the grievance and deprivation theory in explaining the association between fuel price increases and social unrests, but fail to find evidence for the resource theory and the theory of political opportunities.
October 27, 2023
Micro-Assessment of Macroprudential Borrower-Based Measures in Lithuania
Description: Despite having introduced borrower-based measures (BBM), Lithuania's housing and mortgage markets were booming during the low-interest-rate period, casting doubt on the macroprudential toolkit's ability to contain excessive mortgage growth. This paper assesses the adequacy of BBMs’ parametrization in Lithuania. We do so by building a novel lifetime expected credit loss framework that is founded on actual loan-level default and household income data. We show that the BBM package effectively contains mortgage credit risk and that housing loans are more resilient to stress than in the preregulatory era. Our BBM limit calibration exercise reveals that (1) in the low-rate environment, income-based measures could have been tighter; and (2) borrowers taking out secondary mortgages rightly are and should be required to pledge a higher down payment.
October 27, 2023
Do Household Expectations Help Predict Inflation?
Description: We examine whether changes in the distribution of household inflation expectations contain information on future inflation. We first discuss recent shifts in micro data from the US, UK, Germany, and Canada. We then zoom in on the US to explore econometrically whether distributional characteristics help predict future inflation. We find that the shape of the distribution of household expectations does indeed help predict one-year-ahead CPI inflation. Variance and skewness of household expectations’ distributions add predictive power beyond and above the median, especially in periods of high inflation. Remarkably, qualitatively, these results hold when including market-based measures and moments of the distribution of professional forecasts.
October 27, 2023
Assessing the Impact of Structural Reforms on Potential Output: The Case of Morocco
Description: This paper assesses Morocco’s potential output and the scope for structural reforms to reverse the downward trend in economic performance observed since the Global Financial Crisis. Using multivariate filtering (MVF) techniques, our analysis finds that the downward secular trend in potential growth was primarily driven by the decline in the contribution of labor inputs. We then combine production function and general equilibrium model approaches to provide estimates of the potential macroeconomic impact of Morocco’s structural reform agenda. The results suggest that the planned structural reforms could deliver sizable output gains in the medium to long term with reforms that would reduce the large gender gap in Morocco’s labor market yielding the greatest payoffs.
October 27, 2023
Value Added Tax in the Extractive Industries
Description: Lower capacity countries often struggle to administer the Value Added Tax (VAT) in the extractive industries, partly due to the large VAT refunds needs of this capital and export-intensive sector. Assuming that the first-best policy (apply the standard VAT to the extractive industry) is not possible in the medium-term, what should countries do? This paper systemically analyzes second-best VAT policy designs considering the impact of the VAT on three key stakeholders: the investor, domestic suppliers, and the tax administration. The analysis concludes that the generally preferred policy is to provide a VAT exemption for imports and either fully tax or exempt domestic supplies, although country characteristics (and, specifically the relative weighting of stakeholders) matter. Moreover, governments should make efforts to shorten refund delays and transition to a standard VAT over the longer-term.
October 27, 2023
Corruption Kills: Global Evidence from Natural Disasters
Description: Natural disasters are inevitable, but humanitarian and economic losses are determined largely by policy preferences and institutional underpinnings that shape the quality of public infrastructure (including emergency responses and healthcare services) and govern business practices and the adherence to building codes. In this paper, we empirically investigate whether corruption increases the loss of human lives caused by natural disasters, using a large panel of 135 countries during the period 1980–2020. The econometric analysis provides convincing evidence that corruption increases the number of disaster-related deaths, after controlling for economic, demographic, healthcare and institutional factors. That is, the higher the level of corruption in a given country, the greater the number of fatalities as a share of population due to natural disasters. Our results show that the devastating impact of corruption on loss of human lives caused by natural disasters is significantly greater in developing countries, which are even more vulnerable to nonlinear effects of corruption.
October 20, 2023
A Framework for Climate Change Mitigation in India
Description: Climate change poses challenging policy tradeoffs for India. The country faces the challenge of raising living standards for a population of 1.4 billion while at the same time needing to be a critical contributor to reducing global GHG emissions. The government has implemented numerous policies to promote the manufacturing and use of renewable energy and shift away from coal, but much still needs to be done to reach India’s 2070 net zero goal. Reducing GHG emissions will almost certainly have a negative impact on growth in the short run and have important distributional consequences for individuals and communities who today rely on coal. But with the right policies, these costs—which are non-negligible but dwarfed by the cost of climate change over the next decade if no action is taken—can be significantly curtailed. This paper provides an in depth review of the current climate policy landscape in India and models emissions trajectories under different policy options to reduce GHG emissions.
October 20, 2023
Financial Stress and Economic Activity: Evidence from a New Worldwide Index
Description: This paper uses text analysis to construct a continuous financial stress index (FSI) for 110 countries over each quarter during the period 1967-2018. It relies on a computer algorithm along with human expert oversight and is thus easy to update. The new indicator has a larger country and time coverage and higher frequency than similar measures focusing on advanced economies. And it complements existing binary chronologies in that it can assess the severity of financial crises. We use the indicator to assess the impact of financial stress on the economy using both country- and firm-level data. Our main findings are fivefold: i) consistent with existing literature, we show an economically significant and persistent relationship between financial stress and output; ii) the effect is larger in emerging markets and developing economies and (iii) for higher levels of financial stress; iv) we deal with simultaneous causality by constructing a novel instrument—financial stress originating from other countries—using information from the text analysis, and show that, while there is clear evidence that financial stress harms economic activities, OLS estimates tend to overestimate the magnitude of this effect; (iv) we confirm the presence of an exogenous effect of financial stress through a difference-in-differences exercise and show that effects are larger for firms that are more financially constrained and less profitable.
October 17, 2023
Demand vs. Supply Decomposition of Inflation: Cross-Country Evidence with Applications
Description: What are the contributions of demand and supply factors to inflation? To address this question, we follow Shapiro (2022) and construct quarterly demand-driven and supply-driven inflation series for 32 countries utilizing sectoral Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) data. We highlight global trends and country-specific differences in inflation decompositions during critical periods such as the great financial crisis of 2008 and the recent inflation surge since 2021. Validating our inflation series, we find that supply-driven inflation is more reactive to oil shocks and supply chain pressures, while demand-driven inflation displays a more pronounced response to monetary policy shocks. Our results also suggest a steeper Phillips curve when inflation is demand-driven, holding significant implications for effective policy design.
October 17, 2023
Monitoring Demand and Supply in Asia: An Industry Level Approach
Description: This paper provides a decomposition of GDP and its deflator into demand and supply driven components for 12 Asian countries, the US and Europe, following the forecast error-based methodology of Shapiro (2022). We extend that methodology by (1) considering a wide range of statistical forecasting models, using the optimal model for each country and (2) provide a measure idiosyncratic demand and supply movements. The latter provides, for example, a distinction between aggregate demand driven inflation and, inflation driven by large shocks in only a small number of sectors. We find that lockdowns in 2020 are explained by a mix of demand and supply shocks in Asia, but that idiosyncratic demand shocks played a significant role in some countries. Supply factors played an important role in the post-COVID recovery, primarily in 2021, with demand factors becoming more important in 2022. The mix of shocks during the sharp increase in inflation in 2021-22 differs by country, with large and advanced economies generally experiencing more supply shocks (China, Australia, Korea), while emerging markets saw significant demand pressures pushing up prices (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand). We illustrate the usefulness of the industry level shocks in two applications. Firstly, we consider whether industry supply shocks have created demand-like movements in aggregate prices and quantities, so-called Keynesian supply shocks. We find evidence for this mechanism in a minority of countries in our Asia sample, as well for Europe and the USA, but that these results are driven by the COVID-19 event. Secondly, we use the granularity of the industry shocks to construct country-level GDP shocks, driven by idiosyncratic movements at the industry level, to study cross country growth spillovers for the three large economic units in our sample: China, Europe and the US.