Working Papers
2003
April 1, 2003
The ECB'S Inflation Objective
Description: The ECB's objective of medium-term inflation below 2 percent has been portrayed by critics as ambiguous, asymmetric, and excessively stringent. This paper attempts a comprehensive evaluation of the trade-offs for the euro area and finds that: (1) in terms of guiding inflation expectations and policymaking, the current definition has functioned much as would an inflation target centered on 1 1/2-1 3/4 percent; (2) the absence of a specific (point) target for medium-term inflation has encumbered the communication of monetary policy; and (3) a target toward the upper end of the ECB's price-stability range would seem, at least with the current membership of EMU, to strike a judicious balance between the benefits of price stability, on the one hand, and the need to assist relative price and wage adjustment across EMU and safeguard against deflation, on the other hand.
April 1, 2003
Argentina: Macroeconomic Crisis and Household Vulnerability
Description: Using urban household surveys, we constructed a panel dataset to study the effects of the Argentine macroeconomic crisis of 1999-2002 with the aim of (1) identifying the most vulnerable households, (2) investigating whether employment in the public sector and government spending served to decrease vulnerability, and (3) understanding the mechanisms used by households to smooth the effects of the crisis. Households whose heads were male, less educated, and employed in the construction sector were more vulnerable to the crisis, experiencing larger-than-average declines in income and higher dispersion. Households whose heads were employed in the public sector were more protected from the crisis, although higher public spending did not serve to decrease their vulnerability. A significant source of vulnerability was linked to changes in employment status, and we studied the determinants of the probability of being unemployed and of becoming unemployed. Last, we found that households were unable to perfectly smooth income shocks. Given these results, there is room for broadening social safety nets, particularly in the form of public works programs.
April 1, 2003
Gender-Responsive Government Budgeting
Description: This paper examines the concept of gender-responsive government budgeting, promoted in recent years by women's nongovernmental organizations, academia, and multilateral organizations, and the extent of its implementation by national governments in both advanced and developing countries. Owing to recently developed analytical and technical tools, government budget management systems in some countries can help promote gender equality-to the extent of government involvement in gender-sensitive sectors and programs-at any level of available funding. However, to be fully effective, obstacles such as gender-biased culture, the lack of appropriate budget classifications, and the lack of gender analysis expertise and gender-disaggregated data in most countries need to be addressed.
April 1, 2003
The ECB'S Money Pillar: An Assessment
Description: This paper discusses the case for a money pillar in the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy strategy. Time-series evidence for industrial countries based on frequency-domain and unobserved-components analysis suggests that money can play a useful role in gauging and constraining long-run risks to price stability. Moreover, the specter of asset price bubbles and some of the area's institutional features, which may impart considerable persistence to area-wide inflation, caution against shifting to conventional inflation targeting. But the time series evidence also seems to point to a relatively loose connection between variations in nominal money growth and inflation in the short to medium run. As a consequence, effective communication of the ECB's monetary policy decisions from the point of view of the present money pillar is likely to remain a challenging task.
April 1, 2003
Trade, Finance, Specialization, and Synchronization
Description: The paper investigates the determinants of business cycles synchronization across regions. It uses both international and intranational data to evaluate the linkages between trade in goods, trade in financial assets, specialization and business cycles synchronization using a system of simultaneous equations. The results are as follows: (i) Simultaneity is important, as both trade and financial openness have a direct and an indirect effect on cycle synchronization. (ii) A variety of alternative measures of financial integration suggest that regions with strong financial links are significantly more synchronized, though they are also more specialized. (iii) Specialization patterns have a sizable effect on business cycles, beyond their reflection of intra-industry trade, and of openness to goods and assets trade. (iv) The estimated role of trade is in line with existing models once intra-industry trade is controlled for. The results relate to a recent strand of international business cycle models with incomplete markets and transport costs, and, on the empirical side, point to an important omission in the usual criteria defining an optimal currency area, namely specialization patterns.
April 1, 2003
Assessing Fiscal Sustainability Under Uncertainity
Description: Unlike conventional fiscal sustainability assessments, the Value-at-Risk approach developed in this paper explicitly captures the contribution of key risk variables to public sector vulnerability. In an illustrative application to Ecuador, the VaR approach confirms a significant risk of government financial failure stemming from the volatility and comovements of the exchange rate, interest rates, oil prices, and output. Although dollarization has helped attenuate fiscal vulnerability, the volatility of sovereign spreads and of oil prices remain major sources of risk for Ecuador's public sector. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications, an evaluation of the methodology, and suggestions for future research.
April 1, 2003
Deflation in Hong Kong SAR
Description: This paper examines the causes of deflation in Hong Kong SAR, exploring whether it reflects a prolonged process of adjustment to cyclical shocks or whether it results from price equalization pressures arising from structural integration with mainland China. To gauge the relative importance of these factors, the paper provides both an econometric and a qualitative analysis of the price dynamics between Hong Kong SAR and Shenzhen, a neighboring city in mainland China. It finds that the role of price equalization as a source of deflation is minor. Deflation in Hong Kong SAR is best explained by successive cyclical shocks which have been amplified by balance-sheet and wealth effects.
April 1, 2003
Re-Establishing Credible Nominal Anchors After a Financial Crisis: A Review of Recent Experience
Description: This paper studies the question of how to achieve monetary policy credibility and price stability after a financial crisis. We draw stylized facts and conclusions from ten recent cases: Brazil (1999); Bulgaria (1997); Ecuador (2000); Indonesia (1997); Korea (1997); Malaysia (1997); Mexico (1994), Russia (1998); Thailand (1997); and Turkey (2001). Among our conclusions, highlights include: (i) monetary policy alone cannot stabilize; (ii) floats bring nominal stability quickly in countries with low pre-crisis inflation and hard pegs have been at least narrowly successful for countries in deeper disarray; (iii) in floats, early and determined tightening brings nominal stability and does not appear more costly for output; (iv) monetary aggregate targeting rarely serves as a coherent framework for floats; informal or full-fledged inflation targeting offers more promise.
April 1, 2003
The Dynamics of Real Interest Rates, Real Exchange Rates and the Balance of Payments in China: 1980-2002
Description: Based on China's experience between 1980 and 2002, a cointegrated vector autoregression model was established to explore the relationships among real interest rates, real exchange rates and balance of payments in China. Taking into account institutional changes, the empirical study shows that significant and usually non-monotonic interactions exist between these three variables. The paper discusses theoretical and policy implications of the empirical result.
March 4, 2003
How Does Globalization Affect the Synchronization of Business Cycles?
Description: This paper examines the impact of rising trade and financial integration on international business cycle comovement among a large group of industrial and developing countries. The results provide at best limited support for the conventional wisdom that globalization has increased the degree of synchronization of business cycles. The evidence that trade and financial integration enhance global spillovers of macroeconomic fluctuations is stronger for industrial countries. One striking result is that, on average, cross-country consumption correlations have not increased in the 1990s, precisely when financial integration would have been expected to result in better risk-sharing opportunities, especially for developing countries.