Working Papers
2014
April 4, 2014
Financial Crises in DSGE Models: A Prototype Model
Description: This paper presents the theoretical structure of MAPMOD, a new IMF model designed to study vulnerabilities associated with excessive credit expansions, and to support macroprudential policy analysis. In MAPMOD, bank loans create purchasing power that facilitates adjustments in the real economy. But excessively large and risky loans can impair balance sheets and sow the seeds of a financial crisis. Banks respond to losses through higher spreads and rapid credit cutbacks, with adverse effects for the real economy. These features allow the model to capture the basic facts of financial cycles. A companion paper studies the simulation properties of MAPMOD.
April 4, 2014
Inflation Persistence in Brazil - A Cross Country Comparison
Description: Inflation persistence is sometimes defined as the tendency for price shocks to push the inflation rate away from its steady state—including an inflation target—for a prolonged period. Persistence is important because it affects the output costs of lowering inflation back to the target, often described as the “sacrifice ratio”. In this paper I use inflation expectations to provide a comparison of inflation persistence in Brazil with a sample of inflation targeting (IT) countries. This approach suggests that inflation persistence increased in Brazil through early 2013, in contrast to many of its IT peers, mainly due to “upward” persistence. The 2013 rate hiking cycle may have contributed to some recent decline in persistence.
April 3, 2014
How can Korea Boost Potential Output to Ensure Continued Income Convergence?
Description: Korea’s rapid growth has slowed in recent years, suggesting lower potential growth. This paper uses an array of techniques, including statistical filters, a multivariate model and the production function, to estimate Korea’s potential growth. The main finding is that trend growth has fallen from around 4¾ percent during 2000-07 to around 3¼ -3½ percent by 2011-12. Absent reforms, it is projected to fall further to around 2 percent by 2025, primarily due to declining working-age population. However, Korea’s potential growth can be maintained at a higher level by putting in place a comprehensive structural reform agenda, including increased female and youth labor force participation, liberalization of product and labor market regulation. Staff simulations suggest that such reforms could lift potential growth by around 1¼ percentage point over the next decade, maintaining potential growth at around 3¼ percent, counteracting the effect of population aging, and enabling Korea to continue to converge to income levels of the United States.
April 3, 2014
Safe-Haven Korea? - Spillover Effects from UMPs
Description: We examine how Korea’s capital flows and trade have been affected by the quantitative easing (QE) of the United States and the quantitative and qualitative easing (QQME) of Japan. Korea is an intriguing case due to its borderline position between advanced and emerging market country groups, and the common perception that Korea competes fiercely with Japan in the world market for trade. We find that QE had little direct impact on capital flows to Korea, and tapering is unlikely to cause capital outflows from it owing to partial safe-haven behavior of capital flows to Korea. We also find that the exchange rate spillover from QQME to Korea has been limited both on trade and capital flow fronts.
April 3, 2014
Trade Integration and Business Cycle Synchronization: A Reappraisal with Focus on Asia
Description: This paper reexamines the relationship between trade integration and business cycle synchronization (BCS) using new value-added trade data for 63 advanced and emerging economies during 1995–2012. In a panel framework, we identify a strong positive impact of trade intensity on BCS—conditional on various controls, global common shocks and country-pair heterogeneity—that is absent when gross trade data are used. That effect is bigger in crisis times, pointing to trade as an important crisis propagation mechanism. Bilateral intra-industry trade and trade specialization correlation also appear to increase co-movement, indicating that not only the intensity but also the type of trade matters. Finally, we show that dependence on Chinese final demand in value-added terms amplifies the international spillovers and synchronizing impact of growth shocks in China.
March 31, 2014
Surging Investment and Declining Aid: Evaluating Debt Sustainability in Rwanda
Description: Rwanda is a unique case among its Sub-Saharan African peers in that it has already undergone a large scaling-up of public investment. The Rwandan government has made clear its desire to lower its reliance on foreign aid while still maintaining high public investment levels. We use the model of public investment, growth, and debt sustainability in Buffie et al. (2012) to evaluate the macroeconomic consequences of a possible scaling-down of investment in Rwanda. Using the model, we can gauge the consequences of different financing mechanisms and investment efficiency levels on the economy. We find that with some commercial borrowing and a modest tax adjustment, the authorities may be able to retain their high investment spending while still reducing their reliance on foreign aid.
March 31, 2014
Debt Sustainability, Public Investment, and Natural Resources in Developing Countries: the DIGNAR Model
Description: This paper presents the DIGNAR (Debt, Investment, Growth, and Natural Resources) model, which can be used to analyze the debt sustainability and macroeconomic effects of public investment plans in resource-abundant developing countries. DIGNAR is a dynamic, stochastic model of a small open economy. It has two types of households, including poor households with no access to financial markets, and features traded and nontraded sectors as well as a natural resource sector. Public capital enters production technologies, while public investment is subject to inefficiencies and absorptive capacity constraints. The government has access to different types of debt (concessional, domestic and external commercial) and a resource fund, which can be used to finance public investment plans. The resource fund can also serve as a buffer to absorb fiscal balances for given projections of resource revenues and public investment plans. When the fund is drawn down to its minimal value, a combination of external and domestic borrowing can be used to cover the fiscal gap in the short to medium run. Fiscal adjustments through tax rates and government non-capital expenditures—which may be constrained by ceilings and floors, respectively—are then triggered to maintain debt sustainability. The paper illustrates how the model can be particularly useful to assess debt sustainability in countries that borrow against future resource revenues to scale up public investment.
March 31, 2014
Fiscal Limits, External Debt, and Fiscal Policy in Developing Countries
Description: This paper studies fiscal policy effects in developing countries with external debt and sovereign default risks. State-dependent distributions of fiscal limits are simulated based on macroeconomic uncertainty and fiscal policy specifications. The analysis shows that expected future revenue plays an important role in the low fiscal limits of developing countries, relative to those of developed countries. External debt carries additional risks since large devaluation of the real exchange rate can suddenly raise default probabilities. Consistent with majority views, fiscal consolidations are counterproductive in the short and medium runs. When an economy approaches its fiscal limits, government spending can be less expansionary than in a low-debt state. As more revenue is required to service debt in a high-debt state, higher tax rates raise the economic cost of increasing consumption, reducing the fiscal multiplier.
March 27, 2014
Assessing Bias and Accuracy in the World Bank-IMF's Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries
Description: The World Bank and the IMF have adopted a debt sustainability framework (DSF) to evaluate the risk of debt distress in Low Income Countries (LICs). At the core of the DSF are empirically-based thresholds for each of five different measures of the debt burden (the “debt threshold approach” DTA). The DSF contains a rule for aggregating the information contained in these five different variables which we label the “worst-case aggregator” (WCA) in view of the fact that the DSF considers a breach of any one of the thresholds sufficient to indicate a high risk of debt distress. However, neither the DTA nor the WCA has heretofore been subject to empirical testing. We find that: (1) the DTA loses information relative to a simple proposed alternative; (2) the WCA is too conservative (predicting crises too often) in terms of the loss function used in the DSF; and (3) the WCA is less accurate than some simple proposed alternative aggregators as a predictor of debt distress.
March 24, 2014
Disentangling India’s Investment Slowdown
Description: This paper documents the recent slowdown in investment in India and explores its underlying causes. The sharp investment deceleration has sparked an intense debate about the role of interest rates, as well as business confidence and economic policy uncertainty. Our results suggest that while explaining aggregate investment activity better than nominal interest rates, real interest rates account for only one quarter of the explained investment downturn. In addition, standard macro-financial variables do not fully explain the recent investment slump. Using a new measure of economic policy uncertainty, the results suggest that heightened uncertainty and deteriorating business confidence have played a key role in the recent investment slowdown.