Working Papers
2007
November 12, 2007
Financial Development in Emerging Europe: The Unfinished Agenda
Description: This paper assesses the status of financial development in Emerging Europe, analyzes the factors that have shaped it, and discusses policy priorities. Financial development has progressed to varying degrees across the region. Macroeconomic stability and institutional quality have been important factors. Going forward, the EU integration process is likely to propel further reforms and shape financial development in EU members. In non-EU emerging economies the focus should be on maintaining macroeconomic stability and strengthening law enforceability. Creating a well-functioning government securities market, reinforcing corporate governance and creditor rights protection, and promoting the emergence of institutional investors would be beneficial.
November 12, 2007
Finance and Convergence: What’s Ahead for Emerging Europe?
Description: This paper singles out the key short-term risks and medium-term challenges related to finance and convergence in emerging Europe. With the help of a general equilibrium theoretical framework, the paper identifies pragmatic directions for policymakers. While the "speed limits" to capital inflows may be hard to determine, the costs of breaking them are likely substantial. To ensure "safe driving," policymakers ought to build buffers and reduce vulnerabilities. Equally important, yet often overlooked, is the need to prepare for "the curve ahead"-the reversal of external current account imbalances. To avoid painful adjustments, flexible factor markets and strong financial systems will be more important than ever.
November 1, 2007
Is Inflation in India an Attractor of Inflation in Nepal?
Description: The paper attempts to answer some important questions around the inflationary process in Nepal, particularly the transmission of inflation from India. Because the Nepali currency is pegged to the Indian rupee and the two countries share an open border, price developments in Nepal would be expected to mirror to those in India. The results show that inflation in India and inflation in Nepal tend to converge in the long run. Our estimates indicate that the passthrough of inflation from India to Nepal takes about seven months. The paper draws some implications for the conduct of monetary policy in Nepal.
November 1, 2007
The Optimal Level of Foreign Reserves in Financially Dollarized Economies: The Case of Uruguay
Description: This paper extends the framework derived by Jeanne and Rancière (2006) by explicitly incorporating the dollarization of bank deposits into the analysis of the optimal level of foreign reserves for prudential purposes. In the extended model, a sudden stop in capital flows occurs in tandem with a run on dollar deposits. Reserves can smooth consumption in a crisis but are costly to carry. The resulting expression for the optimal level of reserves is calibrated for Uruguay, a country with high dollarization of bank deposits. The baseline calibration indicates that the gap between actual and optimal reserves has declined sharply since the 2002 crisis due to a substantial reduction in vulnerabilities. While the results suggest that reserves are now near optimal levels, further accumulation may be desirable going forward, partly because banks' currently high liquidity levels are likely to decline as the credit recovery matures.
November 1, 2007
Financial Linkages Between the U.S. and Latin America: Evidence from Daily Data
Description: Motivated by recent bursts of global financial market turbulence, this paper investigates the linkages between the financial markets in the United States and those of the seven largest Latin American economies, focusing on the impact of shocks originating in the U.S. stock, bond, and currency markets. After documenting that cross-country linkages were different in "tranquil" and "turbulent" times within our sample, we find that: (i) for stock markets, recent episodes of market turbulence stood out from preceding ones as they showed an increased sensitivity of Latin American markets to U.S. shocks, reversing a trend of weakening linkages; (ii) currency markets in Latin America exhibited a decrease in cross-market linkages with the U.S. during the last episodes of volatility, consistent with increased exchange rate flexibility in the region; and (iii) the external bond markets in Latin America remained on a trend of weakening linkages with U.S. corporate bonds, while they increased their sensitivity to movements in other emerging market bond markets.
November 1, 2007
EU Framework for Safeguarding Financial Stability: Towards an Analytical Benchmark for Assessing its Effectiveness
Description: European finance is becoming increasingly cross-border, while the European architecture for safeguarding financial stability - including decision-making processes for providing financial-stability public goods - have remained decentralized with some explicit mechanisms for coordination across countries. Policy makers are aware of the limitations of the existing institutional setting, but opinions on how to proceed, including on burden sharing, are lining up along national and regional political lines with less attention paid to European needs. This paper applies the 'economics of alliances' to examine these European policy challenges. The paper establishes benchmarks for assessing the ability of Europe's existing institutional architecture to efficiently allocate resources to safeguard the EU financial system against systemic threats to stability, such as the insolvency of a pan European bank.
November 1, 2007
Strengths and Weaknesses in Securities Market Regulation: A Global Analysis
Description: This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of securities regulatory systems worldwide with a view to a better understanding of common problems and areas of global concern. We found that a consistent theme emerges regarding the lack of ability of regulators to effectively enforce compliance with existing rules and regulation. In many countries, a combination of factors, including insufficient legal authority, a lack of resources, political will and skills, has undermined the regulator's capacity to effectively execute regulation. This weakness is more acute in areas of increased technical complexity such as standards for and supervision of the valuation of assets and risk management practices.
November 1, 2007
Can Domestic Policies Influence Inflation?
Description: Globalization operates not only by reducing domestic pressures on inflation but also by reducing the scope of domestic authorities to influence the pace of inflation. First, as markets are integrated, the common, cross-border sources of inflation increase, reducing the extent of domestically-generated inflation. Based on a methodology identifying common time and sectoral trends, we find this to be especially the case in the countries of the eurozone, with their longer histories of product market integration. Second, even the domestically-generated component of inflation may be difficult to manipulate. Policies act, especially in the shortrun, through managing domestic demand. But the relationship between domestic demand (proxied by the output gap and unit labor cost growth) and inflation has been weak, constrained in part by trade openness. Moreover, the domestic component of inflation contains a country-specific international catch-up process that generates price equalization across countries. The evidence is that catch-up has accelerated with increasing market integration. Thus, for the eurozone economies, there may be limits on the use of fiscal and labor market policies to contain inflation. The new member states may not have policy leverage to meet the Maastricht inflation limit necessary for entering the eurozone. Casestudies show that fiscal consolidation needed to comply with the inflation criterion can be large and sustained only briefly to get under the Maastricht wire.
November 1, 2007
Local Currency Debt Markets in the West African Economic and Monetary Union
Description: The paper reviews trends and developments in the rapidly growing local currency debt markets in the WAEMU. The main findings are that common institutions, such as a regional central bank and securities exchange have led to high cross-border transactions within the union. However, excess liquidity in the regional banking system has led to limited credit differentiation among issuers and a reliance on supply and demand conditions as a key determinant of yields. The paper also discusses a number of policy issues, including debt management, that are likely to emerge as the markets for government securities continue to develop.
November 1, 2007
Mainstreaming Statistics in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Approach to Provide for More Effective Technical Assistance: Some Experience at the IMF
Description: The paper reviews the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) approach and efforts to build institutional statistical capacity to permit evidence-based monitoring of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Integrating the PRS approach and statistical development strategies could provide significant synergies in improving the monitoring of the PRSP goals. Mainstreaming the statistical strategies in such development plans should enhance the national priority for statistical reforms and provide a basis for costing such reforms for their incorporation into the medium-term expenditure framework. The paper concludes that such an outcome is likely to facilitate funding for the implementation of these reforms and boost the effectiveness of statistical technical assistance.