Working Papers
2002
December 1, 2002
Performance Budgeting—Is Accrual Accounting Required?
Description: This paper reviews the role of accounting in budget system reform from the perspective of emerging economies who wish to adopt the OECD's performance budgeting reforms. While many OECD countries, pursuing the reforms associated with the New Public Management, have moved their accounting systems from a cash to an accrual basis, this paper argues that given the costs involved, such a move is perhaps only worthwhile in the context of adopting much wider public sector management reforms. Moreover, while recognizing that accrual accounting does support public expenditure management best practices, it is also argued that many of the objectives of performance-oriented budgeting can be attained by less than full accrual accounting, and that unless certain preconditions are met it is safer for countries to remain with, and improve, their cash-based accounting systems. For those countries with sound enough cash-based systems the paper describes a possible phased approach to the introduction of accruals, as well as the parallel stages of adopting the new international GFSM 2001 reporting requirements.
December 1, 2002
Market Predictability of ECB Policy Decisions: A Comparative Examination
Description: Many surveys of the ECB's monetary framework emphasize the inability of financial markets to correctly predict monetary policy decisions. At the same time, these surveys of financial market participants have given relatively high marks to the United States Federal Reserve and the Bank of England on their ability to be understood by financial markets. Against this background, this paper examines the ability of financial markets to correctly anticipate these three central bank policy decisions over the first 3½ years of the ECB. The paper relies on calculations that market participants employ in anticipating policy changes and on term structure regressions that provide ex post evidence of market surprises. While the results suggest that all three central banks are broadly predictable, markets have had difficulty anticipating large changes and cuts in ECB policy interest rates. These surprises may be tied to the large number of policy meetings, particular characteristics of the EONIA money market, and the unique circumstances of the ECB. An added factor may be the absence of a consistent policy on communicating the current stance-if any-of the ECB's policy bias on the future direction of interest rates.
December 1, 2002
Measuring Liquidity in Financial Markets
Description: This paper provides an overview of indicators that can be used to illustrate and analyze liquidity developments in financial markets. The measures include bid-ask spreads, turnover ratios, and price impact measures. They gauge different aspects of market liquidity, namely tightness (costs), immediacy, depth, breadth, and resiliency. These measures are applied in selected foreign exchange, money, and capital markets to illustrate their operational usefulness. A number of measures must be considered because there is no single theoretically correct and universally accepted measure to determine a market's degree of liquidity and because market-specific factors and peculiarities must be considered.
December 1, 2002
Leading Indicators of Growth and Inflation in Turkey
Description: Growth and inflation in Turkey have been volatile over the last two decades. It would, therefore, be useful to identify indicators that anticipate economic conditions and inflation. This paper investigates the predictive performance of economic indicators for inflation and real output growth in Turkey. We find that (i) the forecasting ability of individual indicators is unstable; but that (ii) a suitable combination of these unstable forecasts yields a forecast that reliably outperforms that generated by an autoregressive model. We then propose a two-stage combination forecast obtained by taking the median of the top five performing individual forecasts. This two-stage forecast reliably improves on autoregressive benchmarks and outperforms the combination forecast based on all the individual forecasts.
December 1, 2002
Keynes, Cocoa, and Copper: In Search of Commodity Currencies
Description: This paper examines whether the real exchange rates of commodity-exporting countries and the real prices of their commodity exports move together over time. Using IMF data on the world prices of 44 commodities and national commodity export shares, we construct new monthly indices of national commodity export prices for 58 countries over 1980-2002. A long-run relationship between real exchange rates and real commodity prices is found for about two-fifths of the commodity-exporting countries. Also, the behavior of the real exchange rate of commodity currencies is found to be independent of the nominal exchange rate regime. The average half-life of adjustment of real exchange rates to commodity-price-augmented purchasing power parity is found to be about eight months, which is much shorter than Rogoff’s (1996) consensus estimate of three to five years, and provides an important missing piece of the PPP puzzle.
December 1, 2002
An Evaluation of Monetary Regime Options for Latin America
Description: We assess monetary regime options for Latin American countries. The costs of a common currency are likely to outweigh its benefits, as those countries face diverse economic shocks, do not trade much with each other, and are affected by common international financial shocks only to the same extent as the average pair of emerging markets. Unilateral dollarization would be desirable only for those countries where there are strong links to the U.S. economy, the credibility of the monetary authorities is irreversibly lost, and there is keen demand for dollar-denominated financial assets. Finally, some countries in the region seem to be good candidates for meaningful and useful floating.
December 1, 2002
The Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Stimulating Economic Activity: A Review of the Literature
Description: This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal multipliers are overwhelmingly positive but small. However, there is some evidence of negative fiscal multipliers.
December 1, 2002
An Analysis of Money Demand and Inflation in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Description: This study examines money demand and inflation dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran using quarterly data for the period 1990/91-2001/02 and tests whether the disinflation during 2000/01-2001/02 represents a structural break in the data. A long-run money market equilibrium condition is identified and the short-run behavior of the inflation, measured in terms of non-administered component of the consumer price index (CPI) is modeled conditional on the disequilibria in the money market. Estimation results indicate that the stabilization of the exchange rate on account of strong oil revenues during 2000/01-2001/02 buoyed the demand for domestic money and contributed to the decline in inflation. Tests of model stability do not point to a structural shift in the inflation equation during the period of analysis.
0001
January 1, 0001
$name
January 1, 0001