Working Papers
1995
November 1, 1995
A Survey of Academic Literatureon Controls Over International Capital Transactions
Description: The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.
November 1, 1995
Welfare Reform in the United States
Description: This paper reviews the structure and trends of the U.S. welfare system and the U.S. Administration’s reform proposals. It shows that, despite the attention the program receives, the welfare program is actually quite small and has experienced moderate rates of growth. However, the system does face serious problems. In particular, its structure sets up strong financial disincentives to paid employment and saving at the same time that its low level of benefits fails to lift low-income children and their families out of poverty.
November 1, 1995
Financial Indicators and Financial Change in Africa and Asia
Description: Deregulation of the financial system often proceeds in tandem with macroeconomic stabilization centered on monetary and other financial targets. This paper presents a model where there may be conflict between these processes. The indicator properties of some financial variables may be rendered unstable by the liberalization process. However, other, carefully selected financial aggregates may contain information about economic activity that is useful to policy makers during stabilization. Data from a group of selected African and Asian countries is examined. These are broadly consistent with the predictions of the model, while highlighting the importance of macroeconomic and financial stability for the success of financial reforms.
November 1, 1995
Consumption Smoothing and the Current Account: Evidence for France, 1970-1994
Description: This paper estimates a simple consumption-smoothing model of the French current account, and examines its capacity to predict recent developments in France’s external performance. The model views the current account as a buffer through which private agents can smooth consumption over time in response to temporary disturbances to output, investment, and government expenditure. The empirical results indicate that the model performs well overall, and predicts correctly the sharp turnaround in France’s external accounts observed in the past three years—a feature of the data that conventional models of trade flows, based on income and relative price variables, appear unable to explain.
November 1, 1995
The Fisher Hypothesis and Inflation Persistence: Evidence From Five Major Industrial Countries
Description: This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the strength of the Fisher effect which predicts a positive relationship between the nominal interest rate and inflation in the postwar period in the five major industrial countries, utilizing recently developed time series techniques. The results suggest that the Fisher effect is stronger in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States than in Germany and Japan. It is argued that the differences in the linkage between the interest rate and the inflation rate as between the two groups of countries are reflected in the time series properties of the inflation rates, which are, in turn, partly attributable to the different extent to which monetary authorities accommodated inflationary shocks. The empirical results have a number of implications for the long-term trend in the SDR interest rate and for the financing of the Fund’s operations.
November 1, 1995
Monetary Policy and Inflation Indicators for Finland
Description: The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.
November 1, 1995
Relative Prices, Economic Growth and Tax Policy
Description: This paper examines the role of relative prices in economic growth and the possibility that relative prices are (or can be) partly determined by tax policy. In the opening section, the paper links relative prices to tax policy. Using an extension to a standard model of economic growth, it demonstrates that under certain conditions a simple tax policy, that determines the relative price of investment, can affect the investment rate and the permanent growth rate of the economy. The paper develops a method to obtain consistent data on relative prices for a large set of countries. Using these data in cross-country regressions, it examines how economic growth is affected by relative prices. The results of these empirical tests identify the relative prices as a key factor affecting investment and growth.
November 1, 1995
Speculative Attacks and Currency Crises: The Mexican Experience
Description: This paper estimates a speculative attack model of currency crises in order to identify the role of economic fundamentals and any early warning signals of a potential currency crisis. The data from the Mexican economy was used to illustrate the model. Based on the results, a deterioration in fundamentals appears to have generated high one-step-ahead probabilities for the regime changes during the sample period 1982-1994. Particularly, increases in inflation differentials, appreciations of the real exchange rate, foreign reserve losses, expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, and increases in the share of short-term foreign currency debt appear to have contributed to the market pressures and regime changes in that period.
November 1, 1995
Consumption Smoothing and Exchange Rate Volatility
Description: This paper analyzes exchange rate behavior in a model where consumers trade goods to diversify shocks to their income. A model with traded and nontraded goods is simulated in a multilateral context based upon historical output correlations for the period 1970–92. Simulation results indicate that the observed volatility of multilateral real exchange rates for the United States, Germany and Japan is not inconsistent with exchange rate volatility implied by consumption-smoothing behavior.
November 1, 1995
Methodologies of Price Indices in Transition Countries
Description: Since late 1991, the IMF Statistics Department has conducted a program of technical assistance on consumer and producer price measurement and index compilation for the countries that have emerged from the former Soviet Union. These are countries whose economies are in various states of transition from centrally planned to market organization, and face special difficulties in developing price indices meeting international methodological guidelines for use in setting and monitoring the progress of macroeconomic policy. This paper describes and summarizes the findings of this technical assistance work with transition economies over the past four years, and the methodology developed by Fund experts to adapt international guidelines to the prevailing economic conditions. The paper catalogs the measurement problems and issues for compiling consumer and producer price indices in the transition context, and also comments on the use of these price series in compiling constant price national accounts.