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Saudi Arabia: Tackling Emerging Economic Challenges to Sustain Strong Growth
This paper revisits the transmission of monetary policy by constructing a novel dataset of monetary policy shocks for an unbalanced sample of 33 advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1991Q2-2023Q2. Our findings reveal that tightening monetary policy swiftly and negatively impacts economic activity, but the effects on inflation and inflation expectations takes time to fully materialize. Notably, there exist significant heterogeneities in the transmission of monetary policy across countries and time, depending on structural characteristics and cyclical conditions. Across countries, monetary policy is more effective in countries with flexible exchange rate regime, more developed financial systems, and credible monetary policy frameworks. In addition, we find that monetary policy transmission is stronger when uncertainty is low, financial conditions are tight and monetary policy is coordinated with fiscal policy—that is, when the stances move in the same direction.
Lockdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have reduced overall energy demand but electricity generation from renewable sources has been resilient. While this partly reflects the trend increase in renewables, the empirical analysis presented in this paper highlights that recessions result in a permanent, albeit small, increase in energy efficiency and in the share of renewables in total electricity. These effects are stronger in the case of advanced economies and when complemented with environment and energy policies—both market-based measures such as taxes on pollutants, trading schemes and feed-in-tariffs, as well as non-market measures such as emission and fuel standards and R&D investment and subsidies—to incentivize and hasten the transition towards renewable sources of energy.
This paper studies banks' decision to form financial interconnections using a model of financial contagion that explicitly takes into account the crisis state of the world. This allows us to model the network formation decision as optimising behaviour of competitive banks, where they balance the benefits of forming interbank linkages against the cost of contagion. We use this framework to study various market frictions that can result in excessive interconnectedness that was seen during the crisis. In this paper, we focus on two channels that arise from regulatory intervention—deposit insurance and the too big to fail problem.
The trade discussions between the U.S. and China are on-going. Not much is known about the shape and nature of a potential agreement, but it seems possible that it would include elements of managed trade. This paper attempts to examine the direct, first-round spillover effects for the rest of the world from managed trade using three approaches. The results suggest that, in the absence of a meaningful boost in China’s domestic demand and imports, bilateral purchase commitments are likely to generate substantial trade diversion effects for other countries. For example, the European Union, Japan, and Korea are likely to have significant export diversion in a potential deal that includes substantial purchases of U.S. vehicles, machinery, and electronics by China. At the same time, a deal that puts greater emphasis on commodities would put small commodity exporters at a risk. This points to the advantages of a comprehensive agreement that supports the international system and avoids managed bilateral trade arrangements.
The paper intends to highlight challenges in Asian housing markets linked to fast price rises especially in the advanced economies since COVID, and more broadly including many EMs in the period leading up to COVID. It aims to draw policy lessons on how to manage stability aspects through macroprudential and other policies and how to support affordability through structural policies and targeted government support.
Some countries support smaller firms through tax incentives in an effort to stimulate job creation and startups, or alleviate specific distortions, such as financial constraints or high regulatory or tax compliance costs. In addition to fiscal costs, tax incentives that discriminate by firm size without specifically targeting R&D investment can create disincentives for firms to invest and grow, negatively affecting firm productivity and growth. This paper analyzes the relationship between size-related corporate income tax incentives and firm productivity and growth, controlling for other policy and firm-level factors, including product market regulation, financial constraints and innovation. Using firm level data from four European economies over 2001–13, we find evidence that size-related tax incentives that do not specifically target R&D investment can weigh on firm productivity and growth. These results suggest that when designing size-based tax incentives, it is important to address their potential disincentive effects, including by making them temporary and targeting young and innovative firms, and R&D investment explicitly.
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...
We investigate the motives inflation-targeting central banks in emerging markets may have for intervening in foreign exchange markets and evaluate the case for such interventions based on the existing literature. Our findings suggest that the rationale for interventions depends on initial conditions and country-specific circumstances. The case is strongest in the presence of large currency mismatches or underdeveloped markets. While interventions can have benefits in the short-term, sustained over time they could entrench unfavorable initial conditions, though more work is needed to establish this empirically. A first effort to measure the cost of interventions to the credibility of policy frameworks suggests that the negative impact may be smaller than often assumed—at least for the set of more sophisticated inflation-targeting emerging-market central banks considered here.
The UK construction planning system is overly stringent and the localized and discretionary system of decision-making makes it highly unpredictable. It hinders new construction (both residential and commercial) and infrastructure projects, restricting labor mobility (as workers stay trapped in suboptimal jobs due to unaffordable housing in areas with better prospects). It also raises investment costs for businesses, who often endure long and uncertain wait times or are forced to relocate to suboptimal locations. International and domestic experience suggests that a concerted overhaul of the system is needed, focusing on systemic reforms that reduce discretionary decision-making in granting p...