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Post-Apartheid South Africa
This book provides a comprehensive review of recent economic developments in South Africa and the structural and policy challenges facing the authorities. Individual papers examine a range of topics such as unemployment and the labor market, recent trends in the private saving rate, the role of foreign direct investment in the development of South Africa’s economy, the human and economic repercussions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the role of fiscal policy in economic stabilization, inflation developments, liberalization of trade and capital transactions, exchange rate developments, and lessons from the rand crises of 1998 and 2001.
External Balance in Low Income Countries
This paper offers a coherent empirical analysis of the determinants of the real exchange rate, the current account, and the net foreign assets position in low income countries. The paper focuses on indicators specific to low income countries, such as the quality of policies and institutions, the special access to official external financing, and the role of shocks. In addition to more standard factors, we find that domestic financial liberalization is associated with higher current account balances and net foreign asset positions, while capital account liberalization is associated with lower current account balances and net foreign asset positions and with more appreciated real exchange rates. Negative exogenous shocks tend to raise (reduce) the current account in countries with closed (opened) capital accounts. Finally, foreign aid is progressively absorbed over time through net imports, and is associated with a more depreciated real exchange rate in the long-run.
Unemployment and Productivity in the Long Run
We propose a theory of low-frequency movements in unemployment based on asymmetric real wage rigidities. The theory generates two main predictions: long-run unemployment increases with (i) a fall in long-run productivity growth and (ii) a rise in the variance of productivity growth. Evidence based on U.S. time series and on an international panel strongly supports these predictions. The empirical specifications featuring the variance of productivity growth can account for two U.S. episodes which a linear model based only on long-run productivity growth cannot fully explain. These are the decline in long-run unemployment over the 1980s and its rise during the late 2000s.
The Inflation-Unemployment Trade-off at Low Inflation
Wage setters take into account the future consequences of their current wage choices in the presence of downward nominal wage rigidities. Several interesting implications arise. First, a closed-form solution for a long-run Phillips curve relates average unemployment to average wage inflation; the curve is virtually vertical for high inflation rates but becomes flatter as inflation declines. Second, macroeconomic volatility shifts the Phillips curve outward, implying that stabilization policies can play an important role in shaping the trade-off. Third, nominal wages tend to be endogenously rigid also upward, at low inflation. Fourth, when inflation decreases, volatility of unemployment increases whereas the volatility of inflation decreases: this implies a long-run trade-off also between the volatility of unemployment and that of wage inflation.
Trilemma or Dilemma
This paper studies the heterogeneous response across countries of local currency interest rates to foreign and domestic factors, thus contributing to the discussion on the policy trilemma in international economics. On average, floaters appear to be less affected by the U.S. in the short run (up to about one year). However, there is large cross-country heterogeneity in the response: floaters that care less about domestic objectives, exhibit stronger fear of floating, or show higher co-cyclicality with the U.S., respond more to foreign rates. This suggests that floating does not necessarily imply a lack of response of local policy rates to foreign ones, but seems to allow independence when needed. Moreover, the effect of foreign rates on the short end of the local interest rate curve seems to operate mainly via the foreign influence on local policy rates, thus suggesting that central banks may be themselves the source of conduit of the “global credit cycle” discussed by Rey (2014). At the same time, most countries face the equivalent of a “Greenspan conundrum” as their long term rates are mainly influenced by foreign factors.
Uncertainty, Flexible Exchange Rates, and Agglomeration
This paper shows that exchange rate variability promotes agglomeration of economic activity. Under flexible rates, firms located in large markets have lower variability of sales, reinforcing concentration of firms there. Empirical evidence on OECD countries demonstrates (1) that the negative effect of country size on variability of industrial production is stronger after the 1973 collapse of fixed rates and (2) for small (large) countries, exchange rates variability has a long-run negative (positive) effect on net inward FDI flows. Two implications arise: creating a currency area fosters agglomeration in the area, and a two-stage EMU may exacerbate the current uneven regional development.
External Performance in Low-Income Countries
Assessments of exchange rate misalignments and external imbalances for low-income countries are challenging because methodologies developed for advanced and emerging economies cannot be automatically applied to poorer nations. This paper uses a large database, unique in the set of indicators and number of countries it covers, to estimate the relationship in low-income countries between a set of fundamentals in the medium to long term and the real effective exchange rate, the current account, and the net external assets position.
Côte D’Ivoire
The economy proved resilient to Covid-19 and continued recovering in 2021, with growth estimated at 7 percent. Growth is forecasted to slow to 6 percent this year due to the war in Ukraine. Inflation increased to 4.2 percent last year, on the back of surging food prices, and is expected at 5.5 percent this year, while the current account deficit is projected to reach 4.8 percent of GDP. Risks are tilted to the downside, as a result of the war in Ukraine, global financing conditions, and regional instability.
Weighted Median Inflation Around the World: A Measure of Core Inflation
The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and compares the properties of this measure to those of standard core. For quarterly data, we find that the weighted median is less volatile than standard core, more closely related to economic slack, and more closely related to headline inflation over the next year. The weighted median also has a drawback: in most countries, it has a lower average level than headline inflation. We therefore also consider a measure of core inflation that eliminates this bias, which is based on the percentile of sectoral inflation rates that matches the sample average of headline CPI inflation.
The External Balance Assessment (EBA) Methodology
The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing between the positive empirical analysis and the normative assessment of current accounts and exchange rates, and highlights the roles of policies and policy distortions. This paper provides a comprehensive description and discussion of the 2013 version (“2.0”) of the EBA methodology, including areas for its further development.
