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In emerging Asia, banks constitute the dominant source of financing consumption and investment, and bank balance sheets comprise large gross FX assets and liabilities. This paper extends the DSGE model of Gertler and Karadi (2011) to incorporate these key features and estimates a panel vector autoregression on ten Asian economies to understand the role of the banking sector in transmitting spillovers from the global financial cycle to small open economies. It also evaluates the effectiveness of foreign exchange intervention (FXI) and other macroeconomic policies in responding to external financing shocks. External financial shocks affect net external liabilities of banks and the exchange rat...
Institutional and market frictions impose costs on the reallocation of labor from low to high productivity sectors, leading to suboptimal allocations and a loss in aggregate labor productivity. Using cross-country sector-level data, we use a dynamic panel error correction model to compute the speed of sectoral labor adjustment, as well as the contribution of structural reforms in governance, labor and product markets, trade and openness, and the financial sector to lowering the costs of labor reallocation. We find that, on average, sectoral employment shares converge towards equilibrium allocations, closing about 13.7 percent of labor productivity gaps each year; this speed of labor adjustment varies across sectors and income groups. On structural reforms, we find a significant association between more efficient labor reallocation and financial market liberalization, less bureaucracy, strong judicial and regulatory environment, trade liberalization, better education and more flexible labor and product markets.
Asian economies are increasingly integrated to the global economy through trade and financial linkages, exposing them to the international financial cycle. This paper explores how external shocks are transmitted to Asian economies and whether the use of policies, such as the monetary policy interest rate, foreign exchange intervention (FXI) and macroprudential measures (MPMs), can mitigate the impact of these external shocks. It uses panel quantile regressions on a sample of 14 Asian advanced and emerging economies (AEs and EMs) to assess the impact of financial and real shocks on investment and GDP growth at the median and 5th percentile tail. It finds that external financial shocks tend to...
Institutional and market frictions impose costs on the reallocation of labor from low to high productivity sectors, leading to suboptimal allocations and a loss in aggregate labor productivity. Using cross-country sector-level data, we use a dynamic panel error correction model to compute the speed of sectoral labor adjustment, as well as the contribution of structural reforms in governance, labor and product markets, trade and openness, and the financial sector to lowering the costs of labor reallocation. We find that, on average, sectoral employment shares converge towards equilibrium allocations, closing about 13.7 percent of labor productivity gaps each year; this speed of labor adjustment varies across sectors and income groups. On structural reforms, we find a significant association between more efficient labor reallocation and financial market liberalization, less bureaucracy, strong judicial and regulatory environment, trade liberalization, better education and more flexible labor and product markets.
This study provides a comprehensive overview of Korea's macroeconomic growth and structural change since World War II. The authors explore in detail colonial development, changing national income patterns, relative price shifts, sources of aggregate growth, and sources of sectoral structural change, comparing them with other countries.
One consequence of interest rates remaining "too low for too long" since the Global Financial Crisis is the buildup in private leverage in emerging economies. These vulnerabilities have been laid bare by the COVID-19 shock. This paper employs the growth at risk framework (Adrian, Boyarchenko, and Giannone, 2019) to examine how different types of private leverage present risks to future GDP growth in Asian economies. We find evidence that private leverage can boost GDP growth in the near term, but can increase the risks of low growth over the medium term. For our sample, we also find that household debt poses a larger drag on future GDP growth than corporate debt. In the second part of the pa...
This departmental paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism in the Asia Pacific region, Latin America, and Caribbean countries. Many tourism dependent economies in these regions, including small states in the Pacific and the Caribbean, entered the pandemic with limited fiscal space, inadequate external buffers, and foreign exchange revenues extremely concentrated in tourism. The empirical analysis leverages on an augmented gravity model to draw lessons from past epidemics and finds that the impact of infectious diseases on tourism flows is much greater in developing countries than in advanced economies.
Although capital inflows are generally beneficial to recipient countries, they also pose a challenge for the conduct of economic policy. This paper proposes a conceptual taxonomy to guide the design of policy responses in the face of capital flows. We explore how responses to capital surges should be differentiated based on the source of balance of payments pressures. We also examine whether the policy choices in emerging market countries conform to the taxonomy's predictions and find some correspondence, especially during periods of high global liquidity.
Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question "how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to differences in (physical and human) capital, and how much to differences in the efficiency with which capital is used?" Hence, it does for the cross-section what growth accounting does in the time series. The current consensus is that efficiency is at least as important as capital in explaining income differences. I survey the data and the basic methods that lead to this consensus, and explore several extensions. I argue that some of these extensions may lead to a reconsideration of the evidence.
Farm size and land allocation are important factors in explaining lagging agricultural productivity in developing countries. This paper examines the effect of land market imperfections on land allocation across farmers and aggregate agricultural productivity. We develop a theoretical framework to model the optimal size distribution of farms and assess to what extent market imperfections can explain non-optimal land allocation and output in-efficiency. We measure these distortions for the case of Guatemala using agricultural census microdata. We find that due to land market imperfections aggregate output is 19% below its efficient level for both maize and beans and 31% below for coffee, which are three major crops produced nationwide. The regions with higher distortions show a higher dispersion in land prices and less active rental markets. We also find that the degree of land market distortions across locations co-variate with road accessibility and ethnicity and, in a lower extent, with education.