Working Papers
2015
October 6, 2015
Spillovers from China onto Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from the Flexible System of Global Models (FSGM)
Description: What is the impact of economic spillovers from China on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)? This is an increasingly important question because of China’s growing economic role as a partner of SSA countriesfor both trade and the buildup of infrastructure in the region. The impact of spillovers from China has been an open question because of the challenge to use an internally consistent framework with solid economic foundations that accounts for both the direct impact China may have on individual countries in SSA through a variety of channels (trade, investment, financial) as well as the impact on the region through the global economy (economic activity and commodity prices). This paper explores those channels of transmission and provides illustrative order of magnitude for the short- and medium-term economic impact by using AFRMOD, a module of the Flexible System of Global Models (FSGM), a multicountry general equilibrium model developed at the IMF. Three alternative scenarios are considered: first, lower potential output in China that is originally misperceived as a temporary cyclical slowdown; second, structural reforms in China that aim to increase potential output; and third, a relocation of low-end manufacturing to sub-Saharan Africa.
October 2, 2015
A Financial Conditions Index for Greece
Description: We construct a Financial Conditions Index (FCI) for Greece as a surveillance tool to quantify the degree of the stress in the financial sector. We use principal component analysis to capture the information content of several financial indicators through a single index. We also construct an alternative FCI by purging the business cycle and monetary policy effects on the input variables, and argue that this alternative index is a better indicator of exogenous financial shocks, and thus could be interpreted as a measure of the efficacy of transmission mechanism. We replicate the index for the euro area (EA) as a whole and show that although the developments in the EA were qualitatively in line with those in Greece, they were quantitatively much milder. Our results confirm that monetary transmission was less effective in Greece compared to the EA as a whole. Finally, we argue that our index can be a potentially useful forecasting tool for credit growth.
October 2, 2015
Emerging Powers and Global Governance: Whither the IMF?
Description: The governance structure in global bodies like the IMF continues to be disproportionally dominated by advanced economies. Sustained rapid growth in emerging and developing economies (EDEs) in the past 2-3 decades has led to their growing relative weight in the global economy, but with little increase in their voice in the IMF. The emergence of regional financial arrangements reflects the growing dissatisfaction of the EDEs with the current framework. The global economy is on the cusp of an epochal change moving the fulcrum of economic power from the North Atlantic towards Asia after more than 200 years. This must be recognized and responded to adequately.
October 1, 2015
Capital Controls or Macroprudential Regulation?
Description: International capital flows can create significant financial instability in emerging economies because of pecuniary externalities associated with exchange rate movements. Does this make it optimal to impose capital controls or should policymakers rely on domestic macroprudential regulation? This paper presents a tractable model to show that it is desirable to employ both types of instruments: Macroprudential regulation reduces overborrowing, while capital controls increase the aggregate net worth of the economy as a whole by also stimulating savings. The two policy measures should be set higher the greater an economy's debt burden and the higher domestic inequality. In our baseline calibration based on the East Asian crisis countries, we find optimal capital controls and macroprudential regulation in the magnitude of 2 percent. In advanced countries where the risk of sharp exchange rate depreciations is more limited, the role for capital controls subsides. However, macroprudential regulation remains essential to mitigate booms and busts in asset prices.
September 30, 2015
Optimal Bank Recovery
Description: Banks’ living wills involve both recovery and resolution. Since it may not always be clear when recovery plans or actions should be triggered, there is a role for an objective metric to trigger recovery. We outline how such a metric could be constructed meeting criteria of (i) adequate loss absorption; (ii) distinguishing between weak and sound banks; (iii) little susceptibility to manipulation; (iv) timeliness; (v) scalable from the individual bank to the system. We show how this would have worked in the U.K., during 2007–11. This approach has the added advantage that it could be extended to encompass a whole ladder of sanctions of increasing severity as capital erodes.
September 30, 2015
Stress Testing Corporate Balance Sheets in Emerging Economies
Description: In recent years, firms in emerging market countries have increased borrowing, particularly in foreign currency, owing to easy access to global capital markets, prolonged low interest rates and good investment opportunities. This paper discusses the trends in emerging market corporate debt and leverage, and illustrates how those firms are vulnerable to interest rate, exchange rate and earnings shocks. The results of a stress test show that while corporate sector risk remains moderate in most emerging economies, a combination of macroeconomic and financial shocks could significantly erode firms’ ability to service debt and lead to higher debt at risk, especially in countries with high shares of foreign currency debt and low natural hedges.
September 30, 2015
Big Players Out of Synch: Spillovers Implications of US and Euro Area Shocks
Description: Given the prospects of asynchronous monetary conditions in the United States and the euro area, this paper analyzes spillovers among these two economies, as well as the implications of asynchronicity for spillovers to other advanced economies and emerging markets. Through a structural vector autoregression analysis, country-specific shocks to economic activity and monetary conditions since the early 1990s are identified, and are used to draw implications about spillovers. The empirical findings suggest that real and monetary conditions in the United States and the euro area have oftentimes been asynchronous. The results also point to significant spillovers among them, in particular since early 2014—with spillovers from the euro area to the United States being particularly large. Against the backdrop of asynchronous conditions in these two economies, spillovers from real and money shocks to emerging markets and non-systemic advanced economies could be dampened.
September 30, 2015
Estimating VAT Pass Through
Description: This paper estimates the pass through of VAT changes to consumer prices, using a unique dataset providing disaggregated, monthly data on prices and VAT rates for 17 Eurozone countries over 1999-2013. Pass through is much less than full on average, and differs markedly across types of VAT change. For changes in the standard rate, for instance, final pass through is about 100 percent; for reduced rates it is significantly less, at around 30 percent; and for reclassifications it is essentially zero. We also find: differing dynamics of pass through for durables and non-durables; no significant difference in pass through between rate increases and decreases; signs of non-monotonicity in the relationship between pass through and the breadth of the consumption base affected; and indications of significant anticipation effects together with some evidence of lagged effects in the two years around reform. The results are robust against endogeneity and attenuation bias.
September 29, 2015
Domestic Market Integration and the Law of One Price in Brazil
Description: This paper presents the first assessment domestic market integration in Brazil using the law of one price. The law of one price is tested using two panel unit root methodologies and a unique data set comprising price indices for 51 products across 11 metro-areas. We find that the law of one price holds for most tradable products and, not surprisingly, non-tradable products are found to be less likely to satisfy the law of one price. While these findings are consistent with evidence found for other countries, price convergence occurs very slowly in Brazil, suggesting relatively limited domestic market integration.
September 29, 2015
The Impact of Global Liquidity on Financial Landscapes and Risks in the ASEAN-5 Countries
Description: This paper analyzes the transmission of global liquidity to the ASEAN-5 countries (ASEAN-5), including the impact on financial landscapes and risks to financial stability. It finds that global liquidity transmission and changing financial landscapes have contributed to increases in risks to financial stability in ASEAN-5. Therefore, policymakers in ASEAN-5 should prepare for possible liquidity tightening, strengthen regulation of nonbanks, and establish a comprehensive financial stability framework. A number of couontries are well-advanced in this process.