Working Papers
2010
November 1, 2010
Emerging Asia’s Impact on Australian Growth: Some Insights From GEM
Description: Over the last decade, GDP growth in emerging Asia was roughly twice as fast as average world growth. The IMF’s Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the impact that emerging Asia’s growth differential has had on Australia. The simulation analysis, which replicates some key features from the last decade, suggests that roughly 25 percent of Australia's growth over the last decade has been from emerging Asia’s growth differential over that period. Looking ahead, the analysis suggests that should emerging Asia continue to grow in a similar fashion, Australia’s growth dividend could almost double. On the other hand, if growth in emerging Asia remained strong, but became more balanced across the tradable and nontradable goods sectors then Australia’s growth dividend would be slightly lower than the estimate for the last decade.
November 1, 2010
Do Credit Shocks Matter? A Global Perspective
Description: This paper examines the importance of credit market shocks in driving global business cycles over the period 1988:1-2009:4. We first estimate common components in various macroeconomic and financial variables of the G-7 countries. We then evaluate the role played by credit market shocks using a series of VAR models. Our findings suggest that these shocks have been influential in driving global activity during the latest global recession. Credit shocks originating in the United States also have a significant impact on the evolution of world growth during global recessions.
November 1, 2010
Post-Crisis Fiscal Policy Priorities for the ASEAN-5
Description: This paper focuses on post-crisis fiscal priorities in the ASEAN-5 economies - Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Sound economic fundamentals and timely and forceful policy responses to the crisis, including fiscal stimulus, contributed to rapid economic recovery in the ASEAN-5. As growth rebounds, these economies are beginning to identify, communicate and implement their strategies for unwinding the fiscal stimulus while addressing long-term growth challenges. In this context, the paper highlights the need for fiscal policies to address infrastructure gaps, stimulate private consumption and expand social safety nets. Creating fiscal space to address these challenges will require raising revenues and reorienting public spending rather than increasing borrowing. Supporting structural reforms, aiming to stimulate private infrastructure investment, could help address long-term growth challenges, while easing the burden on fiscal policy.
November 1, 2010
Riding the Roller Coaster: Fiscal Policies of Nonrenewable Resource Exporters in Latin America and the Caribbean
Description: This paper analyzes recent fiscal policies of nonrenewable resource exporting countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in the context of sharp swings in resource prices. Fiscal policies were predominantly procyclical during the boom period 2003-08 but to significantly differing degrees within the sample. Countries that pursued more conservative fiscal policies during the boom were then able to implement countercyclical fiscal policies during the downturn; moreover, they reduced or maintained their fiscal vulnerability to resource shocks, while their long-term fiscal sustainability positions improved or were broadly unchanged. However, these dimensions of fiscal policy did not seem to be linked to fiscal rules or resource funds, as countries with such institutions displayed a broad range of fiscal responses to the recent cycle.
November 1, 2010
Assessing the Risk of Private Sector Debt Overhang in the Baltic Countries
Description: Between 2000 and 2007 nonfinancial private sector credit expanded rapidly in the Baltic countries, resulting in a non-negligible build-up of debt. Could this legacy debt hold back the economic recovery of the region? This paper analyzes the setting in each of the three countries and, with the help of an experimental Debt Overhang Index (DOI), draws tentative conclusions for domestic demand.
November 1, 2010
Asset Prices in Affine Real Business Cycle Models
Description: We develop a tractable way to solve for equilibrium quantities and asset prices in a class of real business cycle models featuring Epstein-Zin preferences and affine dynamics for productivity growth and volatility. The method relies on log-linearization and exploits the log-normality of all the quantities. It is an easy substitute for more involved numerical techniques, such as higher order perturbation methods, and allows for easy implementation and analytical results. We show explicitly the link with perturbation techniques and find that the quantitative difference between the two is insignificant for several models of interest.
November 1, 2010
Structural Breaks in Fiscal Performance: Did Fiscal Responsibility Laws Have Anything to Do with Them?
Description: In recent years, many countries have adopted Fiscal Responsibility Laws to strengthen fiscal institutions and promote fiscal discipline in a credible, predictable and transparent manner. Still, results on the effectiveness of these laws remain tentative. In this paper, we test empirically whether fiscal performance, measured as the level of primary fiscal balances and their volatility, indeed improved after the implementation of Fiscal Responsibility Laws in a sample of Latin American and advanced economies. We show that traditional econometric approaches, which rely on the use of dummies in time series or panel regressions, yield biased estimates. In contrast, our empirical strategy recognizes that, a priori, the timing of the effect of these laws on fiscal performance is unknown, while controlling for the impact of the business and commodity cycles on fiscal outcomes. Overall, we find limited empirical evidence in support of the view that Fiscal Responsibility Laws have had a distinguishable effect on fiscal performance. However, Fiscal Responsibility Laws could still have other positive effects on the conduct of fiscal policy not analyzed here, for instance, through enhanced transparency and guidance in the budget process and lower risk premia.
November 1, 2010
A Historical Public Debt Database
Description: This paper describes the compilation of the first truly comprehensive database on gross government debt-to-GDP ratios, covering nearly the entire IMF membership (174 countries) and spanning an exceptionally long time period. The database was constructed by bringing together a number of other datasets and information from original sources. For the most recent years, the data are linked to the IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) database to facilitate regular updates. The paper discusses the evolution of debt-to-GDP ratios across country groups for several decades, episodes of debt spikes and reversals, and a pattern of negative correlation between debt and growth.
Notes: Watch a video on the Historical Public Debt Database.
October 1, 2010
Deconstructing the International Business Cycle: Why does a U.S. sneeze give the rest of the world a cold?
Description: The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method freely estimates the contemporaneous correlation matrix for underlying shocks in the VAR and (uniquely, to our knowledge) the associated uncertainty. Our results suggest that the international business cycle is largely driven by U.S. financial shocks with a significant impact from global shocks, mainly reflecting commodity prices. Other advanced economic regions play a much smaller and regional role in growth spillovers. Our findings are consistent with the emerging evidence on the current crisis
October 1, 2010
The Euro’s Effecton Trade Imbalances
Description: When does trade become a one-way relationship? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably, even after allowing for permanent asymmetries in trade competitiveness within pairs of countries or in the overall trade competitiveness of individual countries. This is consistent with indications that pair-wise trade tends to be more balanced when nominal exchange rates are flexible. Intra-euro area imbalances also seem to have become more persistent with the introduction of the euro, some of which is linked to labor market inflexibility. Reviewing the direction of imbalances, we find that bilateral trade surpluses are decreasing in the real exchange rate, decreasing in growth differentials, and increasing in the relative volatility of national business cycles. Finally, countries with relatively higher fiscal deficits and less flexible labor and product markets exhibit systematically lower trade surpluses than others.