Working Papers
2005
June 1, 2005
Bank Behavior in Developing Countries: Evidence from East Africa
Description: We analyze the structure, performance, and role of banking systems in the three member countries of the East African Community-Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda-against the backdrop of recent financial sector reforms. Focusing on the behavior of different types of banks, we find no support for the argument that the presence of large international banks would have an adverse effect on the effectiveness and efficiency of banking sectors in developing countries. International banks are generally more efficient and more active in lending than domestic banks. However, as suggested by the Kenyan experience, the presence of international banks may not lead to increased competition and provision of banking services if weak institutions are allowed to remain in the system.
June 1, 2005
Endowment Versus Finance: A Wooden Barrel Theory of International Trade
Description: This paper develops a theory of international trade in which financial development and factor endowments jointly determine comparative advantage. We apply the financial contract model of Holmstrom and Tirole (1998) to the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) model in which firms' dependence on external finance is endogenous, and the demand for external finance is constrained by financial development. The theory nests HOS model as a special case. A key result that emerges is what we call the law of a wooden barrel: if the external finance constraint is binding, then further financial development will increase the output of the industry more dependent on external finance, and decrease the output of the other industry. It is shown that financial development makes both labor and unemployed capital better off, but incumbent capital worse off. Therefore, financial development depends on the relative strength of political forces among labor, unemployed capital owners, and incumbent capital owners. If only the capital constraint is binding, on the other hand, the standard HOS predictions will apply.
June 1, 2005
On the Viability of Conditional Assistance Programs
Description: Economic adjustment and reform programs, including those supported by international financial institutions (IFIs), must cope with informational asymmetries and special interest politics. This presents a particularly serious issue when IFIs make structural economic reforms a condition for providing economic assistance. This paper examines what conditions must be satisfied to make conditional assistance programs viable; that is, to ensure that the assistancereceiving government not only takes the assistance but also implements reforms, without compromising the country's political stability and the IFI's financial integrity. It is pointed out that tightly budgeted conditional assistance programs never bring about reforms, that the IFI's cost of viable programs rises with the dependence of the government on domestic interest groups, and that unconditional assistance might be viable when conditional assistance is not.
June 1, 2005
The Dynamic Implications of Foreign Aid and Its Variability
Description: The paper examines the effects of aid and its volatility on consumption, investment, and the structure of production in the context of an intertemporal two-sector general equilibrium model. A permanent flow of aid finances mainly consumption, a result consistent with the historical failure of aid inflows to translate into sustained growth. Shocks to aid are reflected mainly in investment fluctuations, as a result of consumption smoothing. Aid shocks result in substantial welfare losses, suggesting that aid variability should be taken into account in designing aid architecture. These results are consistent with the evidence from cross-country regressions of manufactured exports.
June 1, 2005
Latin American Central Bank Reform: Progress and Challenges
Description: This study takes stock of the institutional reform of monetary policy in Latin America since the early 1990s. It argues that strengthening the legal independence of central banks, together with macroeconomic policies, was instrumental in reducing inflation from three-digit annual rates in the 1990s to single-digit territory in 2004. The paper also discusses the main challenges of monetary policy today, namely, achieving price stability, restoring market confidence in domestic currencies, and sticking to policy consistency despite adverse effects of the volatility of capital flows. Finally, recurrent banking crises and lack of fiscal discipline are identified as the main risks for the success of monetary policy in Latin America.
June 1, 2005
Tax Revenue and (or?) Trade Liberalization
Description: With the public finances of many developing and emerging market countries still heavily dependent on trade tax revenues, further trade liberalization may be hindered unless they are able to develop alternative sources of revenue. While there is now a well-established body of theory and policy advice on how this might be done in principle, this paper uses panel data for 111 countries over 25 years- cleaned for a variety of problems in standard data sources-to ask what has happened in practice: Have countries in fact recovered from other sources the revenues they have lost from past episodes of trade liberalization? High-income countries clearly have. For middle-income countries, recovery has been in the order of 45-60 cents for each dollar of lost trade tax revenue, with signs of close to full recovery when separately identifying episodes in which trade tax revenues fell. Troublingly, however, revenue recovery has been extremely weak in low-income countries (which are those most dependent on trade tax revenues): they have recovered, at best, no more than about 30 cents of each lost dollar. Nor is there much evidence that the presence of a value-added tax has in itself made it easier to cope with the revenue effects of trade liberalization.
June 1, 2005
Foreign Direct Investment in Southeastern Europe: How (and How Much) Can Policies Help?
Description: Gravity factors explain a large part of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows in Southeastern Europe-a region not comprehensively covered before in econometric studies-but hostcountry policies also matter. Key are policies that affect relative unit labor costs, the corporate tax burden, infrastructure, and the trade regime. This paper develops the concept of potential FDI for each country, and uses its deviation from actual levels to estimate what policies can realistically be expected to achieve in terms of additional FDI. It also finds evidence that above a certain threshold, the importance of some policies for attracting FDI is distinctly different.
June 1, 2005
Subnational Public Financial Management: Institutions and Macroeconomic Considerations
Description: Transparent public financial management at the subnational level requires institutions and processes that mirror those needed at the central government level, in order to generate better accountability and competition among different subnational governments, critical elements in ensuring good governance and efficiency of decentralized administrations. Further subnational debt also has implications for overall macroeconomic stability that concerns the central government. The key components are identified, with a particular focus on subnational debt monitoring and management.
June 1, 2005
Efficiency and Legitimacy: Trade-Offs in IMF Governance
Description: Designing appropriate governance structures for an international financial institution such as the IMF is difficult, because steps to enhance the legitimacy of such an institution through constraints on its decision-making process may affect its operational efficiency. Potential trade-offs between legitimacy and efficiency exist for any public institution but are arguably more severe for an international one, because delegating power to it politically controversial and, thus, likely to imply tighter constraints. The paper also underscores that the trade-offs are not absolute, however: they depend on the specific ways in which legitimacy is pursued-that is, on the specific constraints that are set. Strategic reforms should, thus, aim at improving the terms of the trade-off by exploring steps that are Pareto-improving in the dimensions of legitimacy and efficiency.
May 1, 2005
New Rates from New Weights
Description: This paper describes the result and the methodology of updating nominal and real effective exchange rate weights on the basis of trade data over 1999-2001. The underlying framework is an updated version of the IMF's current effective exchange rate calculation, which uses weights largely based on 1989-91 data. Since then, substantial changes have occurred in international trade relations, warranting a recalculation of effective exchange rate indices on the basis of new trade patterns. Updated weights show that the United States and developing countries (most notably China) have grown in their importance in global trade, while Japan and the European Union have declined, with substantial implications for the path of the dollar and exchange rate effects of emerging market crises since 1995.