Working Papers
1997
September 1, 1997
Globalization and Growth Prospect in Arab Countries
Description: Globalization—the intensification of international trade and finance linkages underpinned by economic liberalization and technological change—presents both challenges and opportunities to Arab countries. After reviewing this region’s disappointing performance in integration and growth, this paper analyzes the empirical relationship between the two and concludes that integration is necessary if high growth rates are to be attained and the region is not to become marginalized. It then identifies the main obstacles to the integration of Arab countries into the world economy and reviews recent progress in overcoming them. On this basis, the paper derives some policy prescriptions.
September 1, 1997
Monetary Impact of a Banking Crisis and the Conduct of Monetary Policy
Description: The experiences of seven countries that have undergone banking crises show that crises have significant implications for the short-run stability of the demand for money, the money multiplier, the transmission mechanism, and the signal variables of monetary policy. Monetary and credit instability, coupled with changes in the nature of the monetary and credit aggregates, complicate monetary management. These findings may require redesigning monetary instruments in favor of faster-reacting instruments, such as open market operations, and introducing additional indicators of the monetary stance, such as asset price and exchange rate movements. More frequent reviews of monetary programs may also be necessary.
September 1, 1997
Derivatives Effect on Monetary Policy Transmission
Description: This paper examines changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the presence of derivatives markets. The effect of adding derivatives markets is analyzed independently for each of the main channels of monetary policy transmission: interest rates, credit, and exchange rates. Theoretically, derivatives trading speeds up transmission to financial asset prices, but changes in the transmission to the real economy are ambiguous. Using the structural vector autoregression methodology, an empirical study of the United Kingdom is used to assess the impulse responses of output and inflation, controlling for the size of the U.K. derivative markets. No definitive empirical support for a change in the transmission process is found.
September 1, 1997
Exports, Inflation, and Growth
Description: This paper identifies some of the main determinants of exports and economic growth in cross-sectional data from the World Bank, covering 160 countries in the period 1985-1994. First, the linkages between the propensity to export and population, per capita income, agriculture, primary exports, and inflation are studied by statistical methods. Then, the relationship between economic growth and some of the above-mentioned determinants of exports and investment are scrutinized the same way. The main conclusion is that, in the period under review, high inflation and an abundance of natural resources tended to be associated with low exports and slow growth.
September 1, 1997
The Impact of Trade Prices on Employment and Wages in the United States
Description: This paper investigates the sensitivity of sectoral employment and wages in the United States to changes in foreign trade prices for 1980–90. Previous studies have concentrated mainly on the impact of changes in import prices on employment and wage levels. This paper estimates the impact of changes in both import and export prices on employment and wages in each of 12 three-digit standard industrial classification (SIC) manufacturing sectors. The basic conclusion is that, for most sectors, changes in trade prices do not have significant effects on employment and wages, although they generally have a larger impact on employment than on wages.
September 1, 1997
The Insurance Role of Social Security: Theory and Lessons for Policy Reform
Description: This paper examines the impact of social security on welfare. The provision of social security reduces precautionary savings and encourages early retirement. Consequently, it lowers aggregate capital, employment, output, and consumption. On the other hand, it also provides old age insurance. This trade-off is examined using a life-cycle general equilibrium model. The paper finds that the current U.S. Social Security system can improve welfare even though the levels of aggregate output, employment, capital, and consumption fall relative to their levels without such a system. The welfare gains arise from insurance against living much longer than expected.
September 1, 1997
Investing U.S. Social Security Trust Fund Assets in Private Securities
Description: This paper examines the macroeconomic and distributional consequences of a policy change, other things being equal, that would allow U.S. Social Security trust fund assets to be invested in private securities. Improving the expected return to trust fund assets, by shifting these from government bonds to private securities, tends to reduce (increase) the future claim on national output of the current (future) working population. The effects on aggregate saving and future output depend on whether current workers interpret this policy change as affecting their future Social Security benefits.
September 1, 1997
Saving in Southeast Asia and Latin America Compared: Searching for Policy Lessons
Description: This paper examines empirical determinants of private saving for a sample of economies in Southeast Asia and Latin America over the period 1975–95. It uses panel estimations to establish relationships between private saving rates and a range of policy and nonpolicy variables. The findings show that fiscal policy, particularly social security arrangements, influence private saving; also macroeconomic stability and financial deepening appear to have been important in accounting for differences in saving behavior between the two regions.
September 1, 1997
Estimating the Equilibrium Real Exchange Rate: An Application to Finland
Description: An equilibrium exchange rate is here defined as the level that is consistent with simultaneous internal and external balances as specified in Montiel (1996). Exogenous “fundamental” variables determining these balances are identified. Along the lines of Edwards (1994), a reduced form is estimated with the cointegration technique for Finland for the period 1975-95. The estimation produced a reasonable set of equilibrium exchange rates that appreciate with positive shocks to the terms of trade, world real interest rates, and the productivity differential between Finland and its trading partners.
September 1, 1997
Tax Effort in Sub-Saharan Africa
Description: Many sub-Saharan African countries face difficulty in raising tax revenue for public purposes. This study uses panel data on 43 sub-Saharan African countries during 1990-95 to measure the determinants of the tax share in GDP and to construct a measure of tax effort. The analysis suggests that the countries with a relatively high tax share tend to have a relatively high index of tax effort, although these results are not uniform across the countries. The results can be used to provide guidance on to the proper mix of fiscal policy in the event of budgetary imbalance.