Working Papers
2003
April 1, 2003
Reforming Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in Argentina
Description: Argentina has committed itself to a reform of its revenue-sharing system. This paper examines this system and the issues involved in its redesign, and discusses the pros and cons of various options with a view to specifying a preferred approach.
April 1, 2003
Pricing Policies and Inflation Inertia
Description: This paper provides a monetary model with nominal rigidities that differs from the conventional New Keynesian model with firms setting pricing policies instead of price levels. In response to permanent or highly persistent monetary policy shocks this model generates the empirically observed slow (inertial) and prolonged (persistent) reaction of the inflation rate, and also the recession that typically accompanies moderate disinflations. The reason is that firms respond to such shocks mostly through a change in the long-run or inflation updating component of their pricing policies. With staggered pricing policies there is a time lag before this is reflected in aggregate inflation.
April 1, 2003
Regional Impact of Cote D'Ivoire'S Sociopolitical Crisis: An Assessment
Description: This paper evaluates the impact of the sociopolitical crisis in Côte d'Ivoire on the economies of its neighbors. Using a nonsubjective weighted index of regional instability in cross-country time-series regressions, it shows that the increase in regional instability caused by domestic instability in Côte d'Ivoire had a negative effect on the growth performance of its most direct neighbors, but no significant effect on the subregion as a whole including the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The paper also examines the channels through which such spillover effects took place.
April 1, 2003
Unanticipated Shocks and Systemic Influences: The Impact of Contagion in Global Equity Markets in 1998
Description: August to September 1998 has been characterized as one of the worst episodes of global financial distress in decades. This paper investigates the transmission of the Russian and the LTCM crises through global equity markets using a panel of 14 developing and industrial countries. The results show that contagion was systemic during the period, with industrial countries providing the dominant cross-country transmission linkages. Both crises reinforced each other, highlighting the importance of studying them jointly. An implication of the empirical results is that models of contagion that exclude industrial countries are potentially misspecified and may yield misleading outcomes.
April 1, 2003
Fatal Attraction: A New Measure of Contagion
Description: This paper proposes a new measure of contagion that is good at anticipating future vulnerabilities. Building on previous work, it uses correlations of equity markets across countries to measure contagion, but in a departure from previous practice it measures contagion using the relationship of these correlations with distance. Also in contrast to previous work, our test is good at identifying periods of "positive contagion," in which capital flows to emerging markets in a herd-like manner, largely unrelated to fundamentals. Identifying such periods of "fatal attraction" is important as they provide the essential ingredients for subsequent crises and rapid outflows of capital.
April 1, 2003
The Link Between Adherence to International Standards of Good Practice, Foreign Exchange Spreads, and Ratings
Description: This paper examines the relationship between adherence to international standards of good practice in policy-making and two key indicators of access to capital markets and the cost of this access: spreads and sovereign ratings. In contrast to other work, this study reviews a broad set of indicators for adherence to international standards. The estimations are conducted for emerging market economies, and pay particular attention to issues of persistence in spreads and ratings and nonlinearities in the relationships. The main finding confirms the expectation that standards are indeed relevant. Accounting standards and property rights are especially important for spreads, in addition to data transparency (SDDS subscription). Accounting standards and corruption are especially important in explaining ratings in addition to trade protectiveness (not a standard).
April 1, 2003
Macroeconomic Performance and Poverty Reduction
Description: This paper investigates the link between macroeconomic performance and the change in the poverty rate among 47 episodes of growth and 52 episodes of economic downturn in developing and transition economies. We show that, on average, (i) the greater the inequality, the lower the elasticity of poverty to growth, and the higher the mean income, the higher the elasticity; (ii) the country-specific elasticity is identical for episodes of economic growth and for episodes of economic downturn; and (iii) higher growth does not bring diminishing returns to poverty reduction. Moreover, we show that very high inflation is associated with a higher elasticity of the poverty rate to economic downturn, but at lower inflation, there is no relationship between inflation and the elasticity of the poverty rate to growth or recession. Trade openness and changes in the terms of trade explain part of the elasticity of the poverty rate to economic downturn.
April 1, 2003
Financial Reform: What Shakes it? What Shapes it?
Description: Despite stops, gaps, and reversals, financial reforms advanced worldwide in the last quarter century. Using a new index of financial liberalization, we conclude that influential events shook the status quo, inducing both reforms and reversals, while learning, more so than ideology and country structure, shaped and sustained widespread reforms. Among shocks, a decline in global interest rates and balance of payments crises strengthened reformers; banking crises were associated with reversals, while new governments brought about both reforms and reversals. Learning occurred domestically-initial reforms raised the likelihood of further reforms-and through observing regional reform leaders. Among structural features, greater openness to trade appears to have increased the pace of financial reform.
April 1, 2003
The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) Opportunities and Challenges
Description: This paper reviews major issues involved in achieving the objectives of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Using a simple framework for evaluation, the analysis highlights considerations relevant to policymakers in the areas of poverty reduction, macroeconomic policies, trade promotion, attracting capital flows, and governance and institutional reforms. The analysis also identifies risks involved in achieving NEPAD's objectives. To minimize these risks, it will be important to make some goals more operational, to further broaden and deepen stakeholder participation, to establish a sound basis for monitoring progress, to prepare contingency plans, and to harmonize the role of regional institutions with NEPAD initiatives.
April 1, 2003
PPP Strikes Back: Aggregation and the Real Exchange Rate
Description: We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time-series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When heterogeneity is properly taken into account, estimates of the real exchange rate half-life fall dramatically, to little more than one year, or significantly below Rogoff's "consensus view" of three to five years. We show that corrected estimates are consistent with plausible nominal rigidities, thus, arguably, solving the PPP puzzle.