Working Papers
2006
January 1, 2006
Habit Formation and Persistence in Individual Asset Portfolio Holdings: The Case of Italy
Description: This paper uses six waves of the Bank of Italy Survey of Households Income and Wealth to explore the dynamics of asset portfolio ownership. The household asset portfolio decision is a choice among discrete alternatives, and I model the problem in a multinomial framework. I focus on a particularly important feature of household portfolio behavior: the infrequency of portfolio allocation changes. I find evidence of strong unobserved heterogeneity through time-varying error components, which I interpret as taste persistence in both the risky and safe asset participation decisions. I estimate the model using the method of maximum smoothly simulated likelihood.
January 1, 2006
Zimbabwe's Export Performance: The Impact of the Parallel Market and Governance Factors
Description: This paper analyzes Zimbabwe's export performance in recent years and identifies the factors that could improve export performance, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Improving export performance is critical to a turnaround in Zimbabwe's economic situation. The growth rate of total exports declined dramatically in the early 2000s, following a large real appreciation of the currency and the introduction of the fast-track land reform program. An important finding of the paper is that policies that reduce (eliminate) the parallel market premium and lower ethnic tensions would be key to promoting export growth.
January 1, 2006
Fiscal Policy and Financial Development
Description: We examine the effects of public sector borrowing from the domestic banking system on financial development in middle-income countries. While these countries' external debt has been falling, the share of bank credit absorbed by the public sector has been rising rapidly. We argue that this runs the risk of slowing financial development by affecting structural characteristics of the banking systems. We find empirical evidence that too much public sector borrowing harms financial deepening, and that banks mainly lending to the public sector tend to be more profitable but less efficient. We note that these effects add to the costs of fiscal prolificacy.
January 1, 2006
Tax Incentives and Investment in the Eastern Caribbean
Description: Tax incentives have been used extensively in the countries of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) to promote investment. The associated revenue losses are large, and benefits in terms of new investment have been limited, raising doubts about the cost effectiveness of the tax incentive schemes. This paper examines the effects of incentives using the marginal effective tax rate approach (METR), adapting this methodology to the case of a small open economy where the marginal investor is a nonresident. The results show that METRs are high in the region; that there is a large dispersion in the size of METRs across financing source; and that METRs on investment are larger than the overall distortion on capital, with a substantial subsidy to domestic saving. In the presence of tax holidays-the most common incentive scheme in the region-the distortion on capital basically vanishes.
January 1, 2006
India's Pattern of Development: What Happened, What Follows?
Description: India has followed an idiosyncratic pattern of development, certainly compared with other fast-growing Asian economies. While the importance of services rather than manufacturing is widely noted, within manufacturing India has emphasized skill-intensive rather than laborintensive manufacturing, and industries with higher-than-average scale. Some of these distinctive patterns existed prior to the beginning of economic reforms in the 1980s, and stem from the idiosyncratic policies adopted after India's independence. Using the growth of fastmoving Indian states as a guide, we conclude that India may not revert to the pattern followed by other countries, despite reforms that have removed some policy impediments that contributed to India's distinctive path.
January 1, 2006
Fiscal Policy and Financial Markets
Description: This paper introduces fiscal policy in a model of sovereign risk spreads ("spreads"). Using panel data from emerging market countries, we find that reductions in public expenditure are a more powerful tool for reducing spreads than increases in revenues. Specifically, cuts in current spending lower spreads by more than cuts in investment spending, and they also lower spreads by more than increases in revenue. We also show that debt-financed current spending increases sovereign risk by more than tax-financed current spending, suggesting that international investors have some preference for the latter. In line with the empirical literature on the determinants of spreads, we find that liquidity and solvency indicators, as well as macroeconomic fundamentals, are also important determinants of spreads.
January 1, 2006
Will the Doha Round Lead to Preference Erosion?
Description: This paper assesses the effects of reducing tariffs under the Doha Round on market access for developing countries. It shows that for many developing countries, actual preferential access is less generous than it appears because of low product coverage or complex rules of origin. Thus lowering tariffs under the multilateral system is likely to lead to a net increase in market access for many developing countries, with gains in market access offsetting losses from preference erosion. Furthermore, comparing various tariff-cutting proposals, the research shows that the largest gains in market access are generated by higher tariff cuts in agriculture.
January 1, 2006
The Global Impact of Demographic Change
Description: The world is in the midst of a major demographic transition. This paper examines the implications of such transition over the next 80 years for Japan, the United States, other industrial countries, and the developing regions of the world using a dynamic intertemporal general equilibrium four-country model containing demographics calibrated to the "medium variant" of the United Nations population projections. We find that population aging in industrial countries will reduce aggregate growth in these regions over time, but should boost growth in developing countries over the next 20-30 years, as the relative size of their workingage populations increases. Demographic change will also affect saving, investment, and capital flows, implying changes in global trade balances and asset prices. We also explore the sensitivity of the results to assumptions about future productivity growth and country external risk for the developing country region.
January 1, 2006
Harmonization of Domestic Consumption Taxes in Central and Western African Countries
Description: This paper examines the reform of the main domestic consumption taxes initiated by the CEMAC and the WAEMU aimed at reinforcing their economic integration. On the whole, compliance with the VAT is relatively weaker in the CEMAC than in the WAEMU. The opposite applies for excises. Major reforms would need to be undertaken by WAMZ countries, except Ghana and, to a lesser extent, Nigeria in order to align their tax structure with that of the WAEMU as planned for 2007.
January 1, 2006
American in the Shadows: Harry Dexter White and the Design of the International Monetary Fund
Description: Two economists designed the main features of the charter of the IMF during World War II: John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. Several of those features are attributable primarily to White, including the adoption of fixed but adjustable exchange rates, the funding of operations with national currencies deposited by member states, extending credits through currency swaps rather than conventional loans, making these credits subject to policy conditions, and encouraging members to retain capital controls as an option for use in difficult circumstances. This study of archival material helps to uncover White's role in this design process.