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Singapore
Singapore’s economy is slowing against the backdrop of a deteriorating external environment and a softening of exports. The main near-term risks are a protracted slowdown in advanced economies and a sharp increase in global financial stress. Given Singapore’s openness, these shocks would hit the economy severely through weaker exports, reduced capital inflows, slower credit, and a fall in financial market activity. The authorities have sufficient policy space to deploy a decisive response in case these risks materialize. A rapid increase in foreign currency lending may also raise the risk of funding strains.
Discerning Good from Bad Credit Booms
Credit booms are a focal point for policymakers and scholars of financial crises. Yet our understanding of how the real sector behaves during booms, and why some booms may go bad, is limited. Despite a large and growing body of literature, most of the work has focused on aggregate economic activity, and relatively little is known about which industries benefit and which suffer during these episodes. This note aims to fill this gap by analyzing disaggregated output and employment data in a large sample of advanced and emerging market economies between 1970 and 2014.
China's Economy in Transition
China's current account surplus has declined to around one-quarter the peak reached before the global financial crisis. While this is a major reduction in China's external imbalance, it has not been accompanied by a decisive shift toward consumption-based growth. Instead, the compression in its external surplus has been accomplished through increasing fixed investment so that it is now an even higher share of China's national economy. This increasing reliance on fixed investment as the main driver of China's growth raises questions about the durability of the compression in the external surplus and the sustainability of the current growth model that has had unprecedented success in lifting about 500 million people out of poverty over the last three decades. This volume examines various aspects of the rebalancing process underway in China, highlighting policy lessons for achieving stable, sustainable, and inclusive growth.
Labor Market and Digitalization in Portugal
This paper analyzes Portugal's labor market and digitalization trends during COVID-19. Portugal had a milder impact on its labor market than previous recessions, with smaller employment declines and less unemployment. However, labor force participation sharply dropped, especially among low-skilled and young workers. Contact-intensive and non-digital jobs and young and low-skilled workers were disproportionately affected. Conversely, digital employment in Portugal grew while non-digital employment decreased. Regression analysis for Europe and the US suggests a temporary rise in digital employment during the pandemic. Policy emphasis on digitalization investments and skills development is crucial for a resilient labor market in Portugal, considering future shocks.
Can Property Taxes Reduce House Price Volatility? Evidence from U.S. Regions
We use a novel dataset on effective property tax rates in U.S. states and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over the 2005–2014 period to analyze the relationship between property tax rates and house price volatility. We find that property tax rates have a negative impact on house price volatility. The impact is causal, with increases in property tax rates leading to a reduction in house price volatility. The results are robust to different measures of house price volatility, estimation methodologies, and additional controls for housing demand and supply. The outcomes of the analysis have important policy implications and suggest that property taxation could be used as an important tool to dampen house price volatility.
Peru
This 2017 Article IV Consultation highlights Peru’s average growth of more than 5.25 percent since 2000, which has led to significantly reduced unemployment and poverty. Inflation is in low single digits, the fiscal position has strengthened, and dollarization has declined markedly. Growth is expected to remain high relative to the region. In particular, GDP growth is projected to slow to about 2.7 percent in 2017, before bouncing back to over 3.75 percent in 2018, as reconstruction spending filters through the economy and projects delayed owing to the Odebrecht scandal start to catch up. Inflation should gradually return to the target range as weather-related factors abate and food price inflation declines.
Informality and the Challenge of Pension Adequacy: Outlook and Reform Options for Peru
Past reforms have put the Peruvian pension system on a largely fiscally sustainable path, but the system faces important challenges in providing adequate pension levels for a large share of the population. Using administrative microdata at the affiliate level, we project replacement rates in the defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) pillars over the next 30 years and simulate the impact of various reform scenarios on the average level and distribution of pensions. In the DB pillar, the regressive minimum contribution period should be re-thought, while in the DC pillar a broadening of the contribution base and/or an increase in contribution rates would help increase replacement rates relative to the baseline forecast of 25-33 percent. A higher net real rate of return than assumed in the baseline would also have a significant positive impact. In the medium-term, labor market reform to tackle informality, and a broad pension reform to restructure the system and avoid competition between the DB and DC pillars should be a priority. Given low pension coverage, having a strong non-contributory pillar will remain important for the foreseeable future.
Frontier and Developing Asia
With a combined population of more than 350 million people, frontier and developing Asia, which includes countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, is located in the world’s fastest-growing region and has favorable demographics. The countries share a number of common macroeconomic, financial, and structural challenges. This book addresses issues related to economic growth and structural transformation, as well as the risk of a poverty trap and rising income inequality.
A License to Issue (Anywhere)
This paper overviews patterns in bond issuance in local and external markets by firms in six large Latin American countries. Data suggest that despite rising issuance, local markets remain small and shallow in several countries. Nevertheless, since greater funding is available to many firms in both markets, we investigate the factors that may explain the firm’s choice on where to issue a bond. Using an unbalanced panel of firm and market-level indicators for years 1995-2015, we control for variables representing several theories of capital structure, and the results show that firm characteristics such as size and liquidity increase the likelihood of firms to issue externally. With respect to market characteristics, the market completeness hypothesis generates the most support, where market scale and depth are most important for the issuer’s choice of the market, suggesting that local markets will have to become deeper to draw more firms and investment.
Machine Learning and Causality: The Impact of Financial Crises on Growth
Machine learning tools are well known for their success in prediction. But prediction is not causation, and causal discovery is at the core of most questions concerning economic policy. Recently, however, the literature has focused more on issues of causality. This paper gently introduces some leading work in this area, using a concrete example—assessing the impact of a hypothetical banking crisis on a country’s growth. By enabling consideration of a rich set of potential nonlinearities, and by allowing individually-tailored policy assessments, machine learning can provide an invaluable complement to the skill set of economists within the Fund and beyond.
