Working Papers
2003
June 1, 2003
Exchange Rate Regime Considerations for Jordan and Lebanon
Description: This paper addresses the issue of the appropriate exchange rate regimes for Jordan and Lebanon in the context of the literature on optimum currency areas and the arguments concerning the use of the exchange rate as a nominal anchor for the economy. It presents some empirical results on the nature of output shocks in Jordan and Lebanon in the recent past, on the price sensitivity of exports from Jordan, and on currency and asset substitution in both countries. It does not directly address the issue of whether the current exchange rate in either country is overvalued or not, nor does it discuss the issue of an appropriate exit strategy from the current peg.
June 1, 2003
Enterprise Restructuring and Transition: Evidence From the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
Description: This paper reviews developments in corporate performance in the FYR Macedonia during the 1990s. The paper finds substantial differences in performance between surviving old firms and nimbler new ones. The paper reviews factors that facilitated restructuring among surviving firms, and concludes that private sector ownership, hard budget constraints, and market-based economic institutions have served to strengthen corporate performance. The paper also shows that the predominance of insider privatization and the resulting low ownership concentration is one of the reasons for the poor performance of surviving firms.
June 1, 2003
Sovereign Bond Restructuring: Collective Action Clauses and official Crisis Intervention
Description: This paper compares the restructuring of sovereign bonds with and without collective action clauses. One conclusion is that collective action clauses can allow efficient debt renegotiation in a formal model of sovereign debt renegotiation while unanimity rules offer incentives for opportunistic behavior by bondholders that leads to inefficient outcomes. With collective action clauses, the mutual gains from renegotiation can be internalized by bondholders so that the holders of each bond issue have incentives to participate in a collective debt restructuring. The analysis abstracts from transactions costs, and the last conclusion might well be sensitive to renegotiation and coordination costs.
June 1, 2003
Exchange Rate Pass-Through in Romania
Description: Quantifying the size and speed of the exchange rate pass-through to prices is important for formulating monetary policy decisions in Romania. Using a recursive VAR model, this paper finds that (i) the pass-through is large and relatively fast, accounting for a sizable fraction of inflation; (ii) the pass-through from the exchange rate against the U.S. dollar is larger, if not faster, than the one from alternative exchange rate benchmarks; and (iii) the pass-through to producer prices seems to have moderated recently, while the same cannot be said yet for consumer prices.
June 1, 2003
The Millennium Development Goals, Capacity Building, and the Role of the IMF
Description: The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent a global commitment to improve economic and social conditions in low-income countries. Capacity building is key to promoting higher economic growth, which, in turn, is an important prerequisite for making progress toward the MDGs. This paper uses the UNDP's emerging framework for capacity building to show how the IMF supports capacity building at the individual, organizational, and the system level, thereby contributing to the efforts of countries to meeting the MDGs.
June 1, 2003
Managing Risks in Financial Market Development: The Role of Sequencing
Description: This paper proposes an integrated and risk-based approach to the sequencing and coordination of reforms to develop domestic financial markets. The paper argues that there is a hierarchy of financial markets that reflects the complexity of risks in each market and the interlinkages among markets. On the basis of this hierarchy, a sequencing of market development and risk-mitigation measures is proposed to minimize both macroeconomic and financial risks. Capital account opening can complement (but not substitute for) domestic institutional and market reforms to support the growth of local financial markets. The paper also argues that domestic institutional investors are critical to market development and risk mitigation.
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