Working Papers
2005
May 1, 2005
Reforming the Russian Budget System: A Move to More Devolved Budget Management?
Description: The Russian federal government has recently initiated a fundamental reform of its budget system, encompassing important policy, procedural, and institutional changes. This paper reviews this reform agenda with reference to the experience of industrial countries that over the past two to three decades have followed a similar reform path toward a more devolved budget management system. From this perspective, the importance of the strength of existing public expenditure management systems to accommodate increased devolution and the scope for employing decentralized agencies is explored. An assessment of the present Russian reform plans in light of this review reveals a number of concerns. First, the speed of the reforms contemplated appears overly ambitious when judged by the experience of other countries. Second, the preparedness of budget institutions is questionable. Third, change management capacity needs strengthening with a more carefully defined strategy. Last, in light of these concerns, it is argued that the scope and "big-bang" approach of the current reform plans may need reformulation into a more sequenced strategy with clearer reform priorities.
May 1, 2005
Does Foreign Aid Reduce Poverty? Empirical Evidence from Nongovernmental and Bilateral Aid
Description: This paper assesses the effectiveness of foreign aid in reducing poverty through its impact on human development indicators. We use a dataset of both bilateral aid and NGO aid flows. Our results show that NGO aid reduces infant mortality and does so more effectively than official bilateral aid. The impact on illiteracy is less significant. We also test whether foreign aid reduces government efforts in achieving developmental goals and find mixed evidence of a substitution effect.
May 1, 2005
Are Emerging Market Countries Learning to Float?
Description: The paper finds that exchange rate flexibility in emerging market countries has increased over the past decade. This "learning to float" appears to have involved a strengthening of monetary and financial policy frameworks aimed at directly addressing the key vulnerabilities that give rise to the "fear of floating." The results in the paper suggest that the trend toward greater exchange rate flexibility, alongside a strengthening of banking supervision, has afforded emerging market countries more monetary policy independence.
May 1, 2005
Reforming Labor and Product Markets: Some Lessons from Two Decades of Experiments in Europe
Description: This paper evaluates European structural reforms over the last 20 years, in light of economic theory predictions about interactions between labor and product market reforms. Reforms in labor markets occur at higher frequencies than in product market, which are, however, more coherent. These asymmetries can be explained by the nature of political obstacles to reforms in the two domains. Labor market reforms can exploit institutional trade-offs; notably, reforms can trade labor market flexibility with state-provided unemployment insurance and can be applied only to new entrants in the market without affecting the set of regulations applied to existing workers. These two-tier strategies are infeasible in product markets, since incumbent firms can easily drive away new entrants. In product markets, however, it is possible to shift responsibilities to supranational authorities, resisting pressures of national lobbies.
May 1, 2005
Regional Trade Integration and WTO Accession: Which Is the Right Sequencing? An Application to the CIS
Description: This paper analyzes the appropriate sequencing between accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the implementation of the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC) customs union and whether the latter facilitates or delays WTO accession for some member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). If EAEC members pursue a coordinated approach toward WTO accession, this may cause delays that benefit some countries at the expense of others. The paper simulates the welfare effects resulting from the two sequencing alternatives (customs union and WTO or the reverse). The results show that, from a consumer surplus standpoint, it would be preferable to join the WTO ahead of the EAEC customs union. This paper does not attempt to assess the welfare implications of joining the EAEC as a political and economic entity, but only the welfare implications resulting from the implementation of the EAEC customs union.
May 1, 2005
Characterizing the Expenditure Uncertainties of Industrial Countries in the 21st Century
Description: A number of uncertainties about long-term expenditure commitments in industrial countries are examined: (i) the assumptions underlying the projections, (ii) the potential to further reduce non-age-related expenditures, (iii) the implicitly assumed absence of "shocks," and (iv) the potential for raising revenue. This paper concludes that (i) there is scope, but within narrow limits, to reduce non-age-related expenditures; (ii) fiscal policy frameworks tend to understate risks; and (iii) prevailing tax rates leave little room for increasing taxation in the countries facing the strongest aging pressures. In sum, governments will have to adopt a much more ambitious fiscal policy stance to cope with aging populations.
May 1, 2005
Inflation Targeting and Output Growth: Empirical Evidence for the European Union
Description: This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules contribute to macroeconomic stability and monetary policy credibility, and that a positive inflation target, as opposed to zero inflation, leads to higher and less volatile output. These results are robust to changes in the specification of the model and time period. The same methodology applied to individual countries supports country-specific flexible inflation targeting.
April 1, 2005
The IMF in a World of Private Capital Markets
Description: The IMF attempts to catalyze and stabilize private capital flows to emerging markets by providing public monitoring and emergency finance. In analyzing its role we contrast cases where banks and bondholders do the lending. Banks have a natural advantage in monitoring and creditor coordination, while bonds have superior risk sharing characteristics. Consistent with this assumption, banks reduce spreads as they obtain more information through repeat transactions with borrowers. By comparison, repeat borrowing has little influence in bond markets, where publicly available information dominates. But spreads on bonds are lower when they are issued in conjunction with IMF-supported programs, as if the existence of a program conveyed positive information to bondholders. The influence of IMF monitoring in bond markets is especially pronounced for countries vulnerable to liquidity crises.
April 1, 2005
The Impact of Macroeconomic Announcements on Emerging Market Bonds
Description: This paper examines how emerging bond markets react to macroeconomic announcements. Global bond spreads respond to rating actions and changes in global interest rates rather than domestic data and policy announcements. All announcements affect market volatility. Data and policy announcements reduce uncertainty and stabilize the trading environment, while rating actions cause greater volatility. Results are broadly robust to country-specific and panel analyses, assuming conditional variance and controlling for the surprise content of news. In subsamples, announcements are found to matter less for countries with more transparent policies and higher credit ratings. In a crisis, rating actions become less important, and investors focus more on simple and timely indicators, like CPI.
April 1, 2005
Financial Integration, Growth, and Volatility
Description: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare gains from financial integration for developing and emerging market economies. To do so, we build a stochastic endogenous growth model for a small open economy that can (i) borrow from the rest of the world, (ii) invest in foreign assets, and (iii) receive foreign direct investment (FDI). The model is calibrated on 32 emerging market and developing economies for which we evaluate the upper bound for the welfare gain from financial integration. For plausible values of preference parameters and actual levels of financial integration, the mean welfare gain from financial integration is about 10 percent of initial wealth. Compared with financial autarky, actual levels of financial integration translate into slightly higher annual growth rates (around 0.4 percentage point per year.)