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Korean Crisis and Recovery
Edited by David T. Coe and Se-Jik Kim, this volume contains papers presented at a May 2001 conference in Seoul sponsored by the IMF and the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy on the Korean Crisis and Recovery. The papers examine the response to the 1997 crisis, its long-term impact on growth, and the state of financial and corporate sector reforms. Authors include academics, Korean policymakers, and IMF and World Bank staff involved in the Korean program.
Are There International R&D Spillovers Among Randomly Matched Trade Partners? A Response to Keller
Keller (1998) reexamines Coe and Helpman’s (1995) analysis of international R&D spillovers focusing on the weights used to define the foreign R&D capital stock. Keller creates “random” weights and shows that they give rise to positive estimates of international R&D spillovers, casting doubts on the robustness of Coe and Helpman’s findings. We show that Keller’s “random” weights are essentially simple averages with a random error. We derive alternative random weights and present regressions showing that when they are used to define the foreign R&D capital stock, the estimated international R&D spillover estimates are nonexistent, as would be expected.
North-South Trade
We estimate a gravity model to address the question of whether Africa’s bilateral trade with industrial countries is “unusual” compared with other developing country regions. Our main finding is that the unusually low level of African trade is explained by economic size, geographical distance, and population. This result holds after controlling for a country’s access to the sea, composition of exports, linguistic ties with industrial countries, and trade policies. If anything, the average African country tends to “overtrade” compared with developing countries in other regions, although the degree to which Africa overtrades has steadily declined over the past two-and-one-half decades.
Why is Unemployment so High At Full Capacity? The Persistence of Unemployment, the Natural Rate, and Potential Output in the Federal Republic of Germany
The empirical analysis indicates that in the Federal Republic the unemployed primarily influence the relationship between the level of real wages and productivity, rather than the growth of wages. This result suggests a distinction between an equilibrium natural rate of unemployment, which is estimated to have been 3-4 percent in the 1980s, and a quasi-equilibrium unemployment rate closer to actual rates of 7-8 percent. Corresponding to these two concepts of equilibrium unemployment, estimates are presented of alternative concepts of potential output that differ according to whether labor input is consistent with the quasi-equilibrium rate of unemployment or with the natural rate of unemployment.
Liberating Supply-Fiscal Policy and Technological innovation in a Multicountry Model
This paper examines how endogenizing technological progress in a multicountry macroeconometric model affects the analysis of fiscal policies. It uses an expanded version of the IMF’s multicountry model, MULTIMOD, in which total factor productivity (TFP) is endogenized as a function of domestic research and development (R&D) expenditures, R&D expenditures of trading partners, and trade. Compared with the standard version of the model with exogenous TFP, fiscal policies have much larger and long-lived effects on the domestic economy and on other countries.
Does the Gap Model Work in Asia?
There is considerable evidence from industrial countries that the output gap is an important determinant of inflation. We examine whether the gap model also works in developing, newly industrializing, and industrial Asian economies. Our output gaps are based on a new nonparametric estimation procedure for trend output that does not require an arbitrary specification of the degree to which the data are smoothed. We test simple versions of the gap model in which the change in inflation is related to the output gap, as well as to the money supply and the terms of trade. We conclude that the gap model works very well in almost all of the Asian economies we study.
North-South RandD Spillovers
We examine the extent to which developing countries that do little, if any, research and development themselves benefit from R&D that is performed in the industrial countries. By trading with an industrial country that has a large “stock of knowledge” from its cumulative R&D activities, a developing country can boost its productivity by importing a larger variety of intermediate products and capital equipment embodying foreign knowledge, and by acquiring useful information that would otherwise be costly to obtain. Our empirical results, which are based on observations over the 1971-90 period for 77 developing countries, suggest that R&D spillovers from the industrial countries in the North to the developing countries in the South are substantial.
International RandD Spillovers
The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.
Policy Complementarities
This paper argues that an important group of labor market policies are complementary in the sense that the effect of each policy is greater when implemented in conjunction with the other policies than in isolation. This may explain why the diverse, piecemeal labor market reforms in many European countries in recent years have had so little success in reducing unemployment. What is required instead is deeper labor market reforms across a broader range of complementary policies and institutions. To be politically feasible, these reforms must be combined with measures to address distributional issues.
Capital and Trade As Engines of Growth in France
An aggregate production function is estimated with recent cointegrating techniques that are particularly appropriate for estimating long-run relationships. The empirical results suggest that the growth of output in France has been spurred by increased trade integration within the European Community and by the accumulation not only of business sector capital—the only measure of capital included in most empirical studies—but also by the accumulation of government infrastructure capital, residential capital, and R&D capital. Calculations of potential output indicate that trade and capital—broadly defined—account for all of the growth in the French economy during the last two decades.
