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The Paradox of Risk
For decades, economic policymakers have worshipped at the altar of combating inflation, reducing public deficits, and discouraging risky behavior by investors. That mindset made them hesitate when the global financial crisis erupted in 2007–08. In the face of the worst economic disaster in 75 years, they often worried excessively about the risks and possible losses from their actions, rather than moving forcefully to support financial institutions, governments, and people. Ángel Ubide's provocative thesis in Paradox of Risk is that central banks' fear of inflation and risk taking has hampered their efforts to revive global prosperity. In their confusion, he argues, policymakers made the recovery weaker. He calls on world leaders to abandon old shibboleths and learn the lessons from the financial crisis and its sluggish aftermath. Ubide mobilizes a wealth of research on the experience from the last decade, urging policymakers to leave their "comfort zone," embrace risk taking, and take bolder action to brighten the world's economic prospects. (The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) provided funding for this study).
How Long is the Long Run? A Dynamic Analysis of the Spanish Business Cycle
This paper studies the sources of Spanish business cycles. It assumes that Spanish output is affected by two types of shocks. The first one has permanent long-run effects on output and it is identified as a supply shock. The second one has only transitory effects on output and it is identified as a demand shock. Spain seems to have long business cycles, of about 15 years. As restrictive demand policies to control the inflation rate could prove painful and disappointing, supply side policies aimed at reducing rigidities in the product and labor market would be a better way to achieve the same objective.
Crises, Contagion, and the Closed
This paper analyzes the behavior of closed-end country fund discounts, including evidence from the Mexican and East Asian crises. We find that the ratio of fund prices to their fundamental value increases dramatically during a crisis, an anomaly that we denote the “closed-end country fund puzzle.” Our results show that the puzzle relates directly to the fact that international investors are less (more) sensitive to changes in local (global) market conditions than domestic investors. This asymmetry implies that foreign participation in local markets can both help dampen a crisis in the originating country, and amplify the contagion to noncrisis countries.
Determinants of Inflation in Mozambique
Mozambique’s inflation rate was consistently high until 1995, and then plunged in 1996 to 17 percent from 70 percent in 1994. This paper suggests that Mozambique’s inflation pattern is a combination of a “fundamental” trend set by economic policies, seasonal behavior that follows closely that of agriculture, and a collection of irregular events that corresponds mainly to agroclimatic conditions. The empirical results show that the marked tightening of monetary policy in 1996 was the ultimate reason for the control of inflation in 1996, and hence seems to correspond to a change in the “fundamental” trend of inflation that may have long-lasting effects.
A World Out of Balance?
Over the past decade, the global economy has been on a dynamic path that is clearly unsustainable, with ever-increasing current account deficits in the United States, financed by surpluses in emerging market economies. In its latest report, the authoritative CEPS Macroeconomic Policy Group explores the link between the U.S. deficits and the global savings-investment equilibrium. They find that the U.S. deficit is likely to be even larger than officially reported and that policymakers do not seem willing to undertake the necessary policy adjustments to reduce it. Nevertheless, a reduction in the global supply of savings may force an increase in global interest rates and thus a slowdown in U.S. domestic demand--thus initiating a gradual reduction in deficits. The authors argue that a key responsibility of U.S. policymakers is to allow this process to happen, thereby avoiding the risk of a disruptive adjustment later.
The Korean Financial Crisis of 1997—A Strategy of Financial Sector Reform
After years of strong performance, Korea’s economy entered a crisis in 1997, owing largely to structural problems in its financial and corporate sectors. These problems emerged in the second half of that year, when the capital inflows that had helped finance Korea’s growth were reversed, as foreign investors—reeling from losses in other Southeast Asian economies—decided to reduce their exposure to Korea. This paper focuses on the sources of the crisis that originated in the financial sector, the measures taken to deal with it, and the evolution of key banking and financial variables in its aftermath.
Mind the Gap
Assessing the magnitude of the output gap is critical to achieving an optimal policy mix. Unfortunately, the gap is an unobservable variable, which, in practice, has been estimated in a variety of ways, depending on the preferences of the modeler. This model selection problem leads to a substantial degree of uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the output gap, which can reduce its usefulness as a policy tool. To overcome this problem, in this paper we attempt to insert some discipline into this search by providing two metrics-inflation forecasting and business cycle dating-against which different options can be evaluated using aggregated euro-area GDP data. Our results suggest that Gali, Gertler, and Lopez-Salido's (2001) inefficiency wedge performs best in inflation forecasting and production function methodology dominates in the prediction of turning points. If, however, a unique methodology must be selected, the quadratic trend delivers the best overall results.
Sectorial Macroeconomic Interdependencies
This paper analyzes common economic patterns across countries and economic sectors in Latin America, East Asia and Europe for the period 1970–94 by means of an error-components model that decomposes real value added growth in each country into common international effects, sector-specific effects and country-specific effects. We find significant comovements in the European and East Asian samples. In the Latin American sample, however, we find country-specific components to be more important than common patterns. These results are robust to different sub-sample time spans and different sub-sample country groups.
