Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Exchange Rates and Trade
We examine the stability and strength of the relationship between exchange rates and trade over time using three alternative approaches, mitigating the endogeneity of the relation. We find that both exchange rate pass-through and the price elasticity of trade volumes are largely stable over time. Economic slack and financial conditions affect the relationship, but there is limited evidence that participation in global value chains has significantly changed the exchange rate–trade relationship over time.
Fiscal Multipliers and the State of the Economy
Only a few empirical studies have analyzed the relationship between fiscal multipliers and the underlying state of the economy. This paper investigates this link on a country-by-country basis for the G7 economies (excluding Italy). Our results show that fiscal multipliers differ across countries, calling for a tailored use of fiscal policy. Moreover, the position in the business cycle affects the impact of fiscal policy on output: on average, government spending, and revenue multipliers tend to be larger in downturns than in expansions. This asymmetry has implications for the choice between an upfront fiscal adjustment versus a more gradual approach.
Fiscal Stimulus Impact on Firms' Profitability During the Global Financial Crisis
Using financial statement data from the Thomson Reuter’s Worldscope database for 22,333 non-financial firms in 52 advanced and emerging economies, this paper examines how fiscal stimulus (i.e., changes in structural deficit) interacted with sectoral business cycle sensitivity affected corporate profitability during the recovery period of the global financial crisis (GFC). Using cross-sectional analyses, our findings indicate that corporate profitability improved significantly after the GFC fiscal stimulus, especially in manufacturing, utilities and retail sectors. Firm size and leverage are also found to be significant in explaining changes in corporate profitability.
The Global Trade Slowdown
This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.
Credit Supply and Productivity Growth
We study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm-bank database covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, together with a natural experiment, to measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to credit availability and to estimate a production model augmented with financial frictions. We find that a contraction in credit supply causes a reduction of firm TFP growth and also harms IT-adoption, innovation, exporting, and adoption of superior management practices, while a credit expansion has limited impact. Quantitatively, the credit contraction between 2007 and 2009 accounts for about a quarter of observed the decline in TFP.
The Slowdown in Global Trade: A Symptom of A Weak Recovery
Global trade growth has slowed since 2012 relative both to its strong historical performance and to overall economic growth. This paper aims to quantify the role of weak economic growth and changes in its decomposition in accounting for the slowdown in trade using a reduced form and a structural approach. Both analytical investigations suggest that the overall weakness in economic activity, particularly investment, has been the primary restraint on trade growth, accounting for over 80 percent of the decline in the growth of the volume of goods trade between 2012–16 and 2003–07. However, other factors are also weighing on trade in recent years, especially in emerging market and developing economies, as evidenced by the non-negligible role attributed to trade costs by the structural approach.
Current Account Norms in Natural Resource Rich and Capital Scarce Economies
The permanent income hypothesis implies that frictionless open economies with exhaustible natural resources should save abroad most of their resource windfalls and, therefore, feature current account surpluses. Resource-rich developing countries (RRDCs), on the other hand, face substantial development needs and tight external borrowing constraints. By relaxing these constraints and providing a key financing source for public investment in RRDCs, temporary resource revenues might then be associated with current account deficits, or at least low surpluses. This paper develops a neoclassical model with private and public investment and several frictions that capture pervasive features in RRDCs,...
Fiscal and Monetary Anchors for Price Stability: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
The paper presents a model of fiscal dominance with borrowing constraints, and provides evidence for a large number of sub-Saharan African countries on the relative importance of fiscal and monetary determinants of inflation. Based on the dynamic response of inflation to different shocks, including nominal public debt, results show that a number of SSA countries were characterized throughout the period 1980-2005 either by chronic fiscally dominant regimes, with weak or no response of primary surpluses to public debt; or by a consistent adoption of a monetary dominant regime. However, a number of countries were also characterized by lack of a clear monetary and fiscal policy regime. The study also finds that changes in nominal public debt affect price variability via aggregate demand effects, suggesting that fiscal outcomes could be a direct source of inflation variability, as predicted by the fiscal theory of the price level.
Post-crisis Fiscal Policy
"Fiscal policy makers have faced an extraordinarily challenging environment over the last few years. At the outset of the global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the first time advocated a fiscal expansion across all countries able to afford it, a seeming departure from the long-held consensus among economists that monetary policy rather than fiscal policy was the appropriate response to fluctuations in economic activity. Since then, the IMF has emphasized that the speed of fiscal adjustment should be determined by the specific circumstances in each country. Its recommendation that deficit reduction proceed steadily, but gradually, positions the IMF between the fis...
The Distributional Implications of the Impact of Fuel Price Increases on Inflation
This paper investigates the response of consumer price inflation to changes in domestic fuel prices, looking at the different categories of the overall consumer price index (CPI). We then combine household survey data with the CPI components to construct a CPI index for the poorest and richest income quintiles with the view to assess the distributional impact of the pass-through. To undertake this analysis, the paper provides an update to the Global Monthly Retail Fuel Price Database, expanding the product coverage to premium and regular fuels, the time dimension to December 2020, and the sample to 190 countries. Three key findings stand out. First, the response of inflation to gasoline pric...
