Working Papers
2022
September 2, 2022
Quarterly Projection Model for the Bank of Ghana
Description: The paper describes the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) that underlies the Bank of Ghana Forecasting and Policy Analysis System (FPAS). The New Keynesian semi-structural model incorporates the main features of the Ghanaian economy, transmission channels and policy framework, including an inflation targeting central bank and aggregate demand effects of fiscal policy. The shock propagation mechanisms embedded in the calibrated QPM demonstrate its theoretical consistency, while out-of-sample forecasting accuracy validates its empirical robustness. Another important part of the QPM is endogenous policy credibility, which may aggravate policy trade-offs in the model and make it more realistic for developing economies. Historical track record of real time policy analysis and medium-term forecasting conducted with the QPM – as a component of the broader FPAS analytical organization – establishes its critical role in supporting the Bank’s forward-looking monetary policy framework.
August 26, 2022
India’s State-Owned Enterprises
Description: India’s recently announced privatization strategy can facilitate a change in the composition of the public sector balance sheet toward high-return public sector investments in infrastructure and human capital where there is a clear role for government, leaving commercially viable companies for the private sector. Against this background, this paper provides a description of the SOE sector in India, consider different criteria which can inform the scope and rationale for privatization. It also highlights takeaways from international experience with privatization, highlights the importance of improved governance and oversight of SOEs and showcases analytical tools that can help analyze risks from SOEs. While this paper focuses on India, the framework for SOEs developed in this paper can be used to evaluate SOEs policy options in other countries.
August 19, 2022
The Fiscal Stance in Japan: A Model-based Analysis
Description: This paper assesses Japan’s fiscal stance in the past and the future with a stochastic structural model called the Buffer-Stock Model of the Government. Our retrospective analysis suggests that the fiscal stance in the 1990s and the early 2000s was overall looser than the model recommendations. As for the future, the model advises the near-term fiscal policy to be supportive with a view to narrowing the output gap and minimizing hysteresis, while recommending a fiscal consolidation over the medium-term at a gradual pace.
August 19, 2022
Bank Stress Testing of Physical Risks under Climate Change Macro Scenarios: Typhoon Risks to the Philippines
Description: Bank stress tests of climate change risks are relatively new, but are rapidly proliferating. The IMF and World Bank staff collaborated to develop an experimental macro scenario stress testing approach to examine physical risks for banks by building a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model linked to global climate and a catastrophe risk model specifically for the Philippines. Our model shows that the impact of extremely rare typhoons on GDP could already be systemic and worsen substantially with climate change. However, bank capital declines only modestly unless the event is compounded with other disasters, partly thanks to the strength of Philippines’ banks and economy before the COVID crisis. However, more work is needed before drawing strong conclusions about the relevance of climate risk, as the model focused only on typhoons’ physical capital destructions and their macroeconomic-level transmissions to banks.
August 12, 2022
Debt-for-Climate Swaps: Analysis, Design, and Implementation
Description: This paper compares debt-for-climate swaps—partial debt relief operations conditional on debtor commitments to undertake climate-related investments—to alternative fiscal support instruments. Because some of the benefits of debt-climate swaps accrue to non-participating creditors, they are generally less efficient forms of support than conditional grants and/or broad debt restructuring (which could be linked to climate adaptation when the latter significantly reduces credit risk). This said, debt-climate swaps could be superior to conditional grants when they can be structured in a way that makes the climate commitment de facto senior to debt service; and they could be superior to comprehensive debt restructuring in narrow settings, when the latter is expected to produce large economic dislocations and the debt-climate swap is expected to materially reduce debt risks (and achieve debt sustainability). Furthermore, debt-climate swaps could be useful to expand fiscal space for climate investment when grants or more comprehensive debt relief are just not on the table. The paper explores policy actions that would benefit both debt-climate swaps and other forms of climate finance, including developing markets for debt instruments linked to climate performance.
August 12, 2022
Inflation Expectations and the Supply Chain
Description: We show that firms rely on price changes observed along their supply chain to form expectations about aggregate inflation, and that these expectations have a complete pass-through to sales prices. Leveraging a unique dataset on Chilean firms merging expectation surveys and records from the VAT and customs registries, we document that changes in prices at which firms purchase inputs inform their forecasts of the economy’s inflation. This is the case even if changes in input costs do not determine the inflation outcome. These findings reject the full-information rational-expectations hypothesis and are consistent with firms’ disagreement about future inflation and inattention to macroeconomic news, which we document for Chile. Our results from a firm-level Phillips’ curve estimation suggest that firms’ beliefs about inflation are a key determinant for their price-setting decisions. Therefore, we argue that the channel we highlight in this paper has the potential to lead to dispersion in inflation expectations, price dispersion, and weaken the expectation channel of policies.
July 29, 2022
Estimating Macro-Fiscal Effects of Climate Shocks From Billions of Geospatial Weather Observations
Description: A growing literature estimates the macroeconomic effect of weather using variations in annual country-level averages of temperature and precipitation. However, averages may not reveal the effects of extreme events that occur at a higher time frequency or higher spatial resolution. To address this issue, we rely on global daily weather measurements with a 30-km spatial resolution from 1979 to 2019 and construct 164 weather variables and their lags. We select a parsimonious subset of relevant weather variables using an algorithm based on the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator. We also expand the literature by analyzing weather impacts on government revenue, expenditure, and debt, in addition to GDP per capita. We find that an increase in the occurrence of high temperatures and droughts reduce GDP, whereas more frequent mild temperatures have a positive impact. The share of GDP variations that is explained by weather as captured by the handful of our selected variables is much higher than what was previously implied by using annual temperature and precipitation averages. We also find evidence of counter-cyclical fiscal policies that mitigate adverse weather shocks, especially excessive or unusually low precipitation episodes.
July 29, 2022
Reducing Dollarization in the Caucasus and Central Asia
Description: Declining but still high dollarization rates in the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) region affect macroeconomic stability, monetary policy transmission, and financial sector development. Although several studies have investigated the dynamics of dollarization in the CCA, the relative roles of macrofinancial policies and financial market development in the de-dollarization process have not yet been assessed empirically. This paper takes stock of de-dollarization efforts and explores the short-term drivers of financial de‐dollarization in the CCA region. It highlights that there remains significant scope to further reduce dollarization through continued progress in strengthening macroeconomic policy frameworks and in developing markets and institutions.
July 29, 2022
Understanding and Predicting Systemic Corporate Distress: A Machine-Learning Approach
Description: In this paper, we study systemic non-financial corporate sector distress using firm-level probabilities of default (PD), covering 55 economies, and spanning the last three decades. Systemic corporate distress is identified by elevated PDs across a large portion of the firms in an economy. A machine-learning based early warning system is constructed to predict the onset of distress in one year’s time. Our results show that credit expansion, monetary policy tightening, overvalued stock prices, and debt-linked balance-sheet weaknesses predict corporate distress. We also find that systemic corporate distress events are associated with contractions in GDP and credit growth in advanced and emerging markets at different degrees and milder than financial crises.
July 29, 2022
Surging Energy Prices in Europe in the Aftermath of the War: How to Support the Vulnerable and Speed up the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels
Description: We estimate that the recent surge in international fossil fuel prices will raise European households’ cost of living in 2022 by close to 7 percent of consumption on average. Household burdens vary significantly across and within countries, but in most cases they are regressive. Policymakers have mostly responded to the shock with broad-based price-suppressing measures, including subsidies, tax reductions, and price controls. Going forward, the policy emphasis should shift rapidly towards allowing price signals to operate more freely and providing income relief to the vulnerable. The surge in energy prices will encourage energy conservation and investments in renewable energy, but the manyfold rise in natural gas prices could lead to a persistent switch towards coal. To ensure steady progress towards carbon emissions reduction goals, authorities could use the opportunity to strengthen carbon pricing when global fossil fuel prices decline in the future. Non-price incentives for investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy should also be enhanced, as envisaged in the RePowerEU plan.