Working Papers
2003
November 1, 2003
Social Impact of a Tax Reform: The Case of Ethiopia
Description: This paper provides an assessment of the poverty and social impact of replacing Ethiopia's sales tax with a value-added tax (VAT). The results indicate that this reform has not had a major adverse effect on the poorest 40 percent of the population. The VAT is progressive in its incidence, and the higher revenues brought about by the VAT can provide additional funds for poverty-reducing spending, including primary education. At the same time, there is significant scope for making education spending more pro-poor by increasing the access of low-income households to schools.
November 1, 2003
Are Pegged and Intermediate Regimes More Crisis Prone?
Description: This paper provides evidence on the susceptibility of different types of exchange rate regimes to currency crises during 1990-2001. It explores the incidence of crises, identified as episodes of severe exchange market pressure, to seek evidence on whether pegged regimes are more crisis prone than floating regimes and on whether certain types of pegged regimes are more crisis prone than others. The paper finds that pegged regimes, as a whole, have been characterized by a higher incidence of crises than floating regimes, for countries that are more integrated with international capital markets; and that intermediate regimes (mainly soft pegs and tightly-managed floating regimes) have been more crisis prone than both hard pegs and other floating regimes-a view consistent with the bipolar view of exchange rate regimes. The degree of crisis proneness seems to be broadly similar across different types of intermediate regimes.
November 1, 2003
Predicting Sovereign Debt Crises
Description: We develop an early-warning model of sovereign debt crises. A country is defined to be in a debt crisis if it is classified as being in default by Standard & Poor's, or if it has access to nonconcessional IMF financing in excess of 100 percent of quota. By means of logit and binary recursive tree analysis, we identify macroeconomic variables reflecting solvency and liquidity factors that predict a debt-crisis episode one year in advance. The logit model predicts 74 percent of all crises entries while sending few false alarms, and the recursive tree 89 percent while sending more false alarms.
November 1, 2003
Greater Monetary Policy Transparency for the G3: Lessons From Full-Fledged Inflation Targeters
Description: The experience of full-fledged inflation targeting (FFIT) countries is used here to shed light on the costs and benefits of greater monetary policy transparency for the G3. For the United States and the euro area, a hypothetical adoption of FFIT would incur a cost of less discretion while gaining the benefit of locking in a highly credible framework. The adoption of FFIT by Japan would create the risk of a further hit to credibility if policy was not able to end deflation. In practice, the G3 are already moving toward a new monetary regime that resembles FFIT in transparency, but not in accountability.
November 1, 2003
Growth and Recovery in Mongolia During Transition
Description: This paper studies Mongolia's experience of growth and recovery during the first decade of its transition to a market-based system and compares it with those of other transition economies. Mongolia, like most other transition economies, experienced a painful, initial "transformational recession" before the economy began to recover, with efficiency gains the main source of growth during the early stages of transition. Mongolia's transition process has been relatively smooth compared with other transition economies, probably reflecting the combined effects of some favorable initial conditions, coupled with the early adoption of appropriate adjustment policies and market-oriented reforms.
November 1, 2003
Social Incidence of the General Sales Tax in Pakistan
Description: This paper analyses the social incidence of the general sales tax (GST) in Pakistan. The main finding of the study is that contrary to widespread perception, the social incidence of the GST in Pakistan is slightly progressive. The main reason for this counterintuitive result is that most items heavily consumed by the poor are exempt from GST in Pakistan.
November 1, 2003
Early Birds, Late Risers, and Sleeping Beauties: Bank Credit Growth to the Private Sector in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Balkans
Description: Following a period of privatization and restructuring, commercial banks in Central and Eastern Europe and, more recently, in the Balkans have rapidly expanded their lending to the private sector. This paper describes the causes of this expansion, assesses future trends, and evaluates its policy implications. It concludes that bank credit to the private sector is likely to continue rising faster than GDP in the next few years throughout the region, picking up also in countries where so far it has been stalled. Although this growth should be regarded as a structural and positive development, policymakers will have to evaluate carefully its implications for macroeconomic developments and financial stability.
November 1, 2003
Mauritius: Unemployment and the Role of Institutions
Description: Despite strong economic growth, a "U"-curve unemployment phenomenon in Mauritius can be observed. Unemployment plunged from 21 percent to less than 4 percent between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, but this trend was reversed and the rate increased to 10 percent by end-2002. This paper provides an analytical framework to explain this development. The growth of higher-skilled sectors coupled with rigidities in the labor market seem to account for the observed unemployment behavior. Policy makers can improve employment prospects by not only investing in education to reduce skills mismatch but also by reforming the pay-setting institutions.
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