Working Papers
2002
April 1, 2002
Expenditure Composition, Fiscal Adjustment, and Growth in Low-Income Countries
Description: This paper assesses the effects of expenditure composition as well as fiscal adjustment on economic growth in a sample of 39 low-income countries during the 1990s. The paper finds that strong budgetary positions and fiscal consolidation are generally associated with higher economic growth in both the short and long terms. The composition of public outlays also matters: Countries where spending is concentrated on wages tend to have lower growth, while those that allocate higher shares to capital and nonwage goods and services enjoy faster output expansion. Expenditure composition, along with the size of the fiscal consolidation and initial fiscal conditions, affects the sustainability of adjustment. Initial fiscal conditions also have a bearing on the nexus between fiscal deficits and growth.
April 1, 2002
Growing Up with Capital Flows
Description: In a sample of 60 developing countries, we find evidence of a strong-almost one-to-one-relationship between capital inflows and domestic investment. However, this relationship has evolved over time. While growing financial integration with the rest of the world has increased access to foreign private capital, the relationship between foreign capital and domestic investment has weakened, reflecting changes in the composition of inflows, offsetting outflows, and increased foreign-currency reserve requirements. In contrast, better policies have not only brought in more capital but also, especially for foreign direct investment, have tended to strengthen the relationship between foreign capital and domestic investment.
April 1, 2002
International Contagion Effects from the Russian Crisis and the LTCM Near-Collapse
Description: We examine empirically the episode of extraordinary turbulence in global financial markets during 1998. The analysis focuses on the market assessment of credit risk captured by daily movements in bond spreads for twelve countries. A dynamic latent factor model is estimated using indirect inference to quantify the effects of unanticipated shocks across borders or "contagion," controlling for common global shocks, country-specific shocks and regional factors. The results show that there were substantial international contagion effects resulting from both the Russian and LTCM crises. The proportion of volatility explained by contagion is not necessarily larger in developing than in developed nations.
April 1, 2002
Vested Interests in a Positive Theory of IFI Conditionality
Description: Understanding of the domestic political environment is key to building broad country ownership and the successful implementation of reform programs supported by international financial institutions (IFIs). But recipient countries are not unitary actors: policymakers are influenced by special interest groups (SIGs) opposing reforms, leading to distorted policies. Using a new model of the financial relations between a benevolent IFI and a sovereign borrower subject to influence by SIGs, we analyze the determinants and welfare impacts of conditional and unconditional assistance. While conditionality may raise IFI welfare, economize on the amount of assistance, and lower domestic distortions, it may not always raise recipient country welfare. Recipient governments are always better off if assistance is provided unconditionally.
April 1, 2002
The Costs and Benefits of Various Wage Bargaining Structures: An Empirical Exploration
Description: The literature on the relationship between the unemployment rate and wage bargaining fails to separate the offsetting effects of a reduction in competition associated with centralized bargaining and the increased awareness of unemployment externalities. This paper uses OECD data to distinguish these effects. While wages have become more sensitive to changes in the unemployment rate in countries that have switched to centralized wage-bargaining arrangements, the industry wage is not particularly sensitive to internal factors (relative price and productivity shifts) in economies with centralized/industry-level bargaining arrangements. The latter effect dominates in terms of persistently high unemployment and weaker growth.
April 1, 2002
You Say You Want A Revolution: Information Technology and Growth
Description: The information technology (IT) revolution has arrived, but how much will it change the world? It has been established that IT is contributing to labor productivity growth through both increases in the levels of IT capital per worker and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the production of IT equipment. The main outstanding issue is whether IT is contributing to TFP growth more generally. Using data on IT expenditure and production for a broad sample of countries, we find a positive, large, and significant effect of IT expenditure on the acceleration in TFP in the late 1990s and a smaller-and significant-effect of IT production. We also find evidence that the impact of IT expenditure on TFP growth increases over time, suggesting that spillovers materialize gradually. Our results suggest that the increase in IT expenditure across industrial countries during 1995-2000 will eventually lead to an average increase in TFP growth of about one-third of 1 percent per year.
April 1, 2002
The Aging of the Population and the Size of the Welfare State
Description: Data for the United States and countries in Western Europe indicate a negative correlation between the dependency ratio and both labor tax rates and the generosity of social transfers, after controlling for other factors that influence the size of the welfare state. This is despite the increased political clout of the dependent population implied by the aging of the population. This paper develops a model of intra-and inter-generational transfers and human capital formation which addresses this seeming puzzle. We show that with democratic voting, a higher dependency ratio can lead to lower taxes or less generous social transfers.
April 1, 2002
Dread of Depreciation: Measuring Real Exchange Rate Interventions
Description: We specify an empirical framework to detect the effects of official intervention on real exchange rate dynamics. Using data for 27 advanced and emerging market economies, we find evidence that interventions are a near-universal practice; almost all countries intervene when real exchange rates depreciate; interventions reduce the degree of persistence in real exchange rates; and the defense of an overvalued currency tends to be contractionary.
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