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Policymakers in Malaysia should weigh the distributional consequences of policy actions. They should also consider measures to alleviate the disproportionate impact that market imperfections have on small and medium-size industries.
June 1998 This study of inflation in Albania yields several conclusions: * Fighting inflation and keeping exports competitive requires cuts in the budget deficit and credit to government. * The strong seasonal inflation can be somewhat ameliorated by improving infrastructure and customs services. * Structural reforms and improved infrastructure should be part of all stabilization programs, because growth reduces inflation. Domac and Elbirt investigate the behavior and determinants of inflation in Albania, using three approaches. They * Decompose inflation into four components: seasonal, cyclical, trend, and random. * Rely on the widely used Granger causality test, using disaggregated data on...
November 1998 To what extent did tightening monetary policy magnify the East Asian crisis through its adverse effects on credit supply? In the Republic of Korea, interest rate spreads, which capture credit channel effects, influence economic activity, and these effects are disproportionately larger for small and medium-size enterprises. So policymakers who neglect credit channel effects might be overkilling the economy and altogether overlooking the disproportionate effects of monetary and financial shocks on some sectors. The debates surrounding the recent East Asian crisis have focused not only on causes but also on policy actions in the wake of the initial shock. This has raised questions...
December 2000 One problem when estimating a Cobb-Douglas production function with micro data is how to deal with the observations that show positive output but do not use some of the inputs. As the log of zero is not defined, one standard procedure is to arbitrarily replace those zero values with "sufficiently small" numbers. But can we do better than that? An alternative approach is presented and applied to Mexican farm-level data. The standard approach for fitting a Cobb-Douglas production function to micro data with zero values is to replace those values with "sufficiently small" numbers to facilitate the logarithmic transformation. In general, the estimates obtained are extremely sensiti...
Governments' contingent liabilities increase fiscal vulnerability, but are omitted in traditional measures of the current deficit. In the Czech Republic this omission may mean that fiscal adjustment has been overstated by 3 to 4 percent of annual GDP, with future budgets having to pay for past guarantees. The stock of existing contingent liabilities in Macedonia could add 2 to 4 percent of GDP to that country's future deficits.
I provide the first comprehensive analysis of isolation programs for financially distressed firms in transition economies. The study is based on empirical evidence from the Romanian program. The results indicate that the isolation program did not deliver any tangible improvements in operational performance, nor did it enhance the process of privatization or liquidation of large loss-making enterprises. I also show that firms included in the program faced softer budget constraints than their comparators outside the program. These findings question the feasibility of creating special programs for enterprise restructuring and privatization under government auspices.
Cross-country and time-series evidence from some OECD and developing countries shows that pension funds and life and nonlife insurance companies contribute to stock market development.
A positive historical shock to external spreads can lead to an increase in domestic spreads and a reduction in the cyclical component of output. Shocks to external spreads immediately after the Mexican peso crisis had a sizable effect on movements in output and domestic interest rate spreads in Argentina.
Transition economies are at different stages of integration into the world trading system. Most remaining reforms and adjustments must be initiated by the countries themselves. But the United States and the European Union can help by reviewing their policies toward "nonmarket" economies.