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Toward A Fiscal Union for the Euro Area
This is on a highly topical issue and addresses a key policy issue for Europe—namely, reinforcing EMU institutional architecture along with the Banking Union. Some proposals have emerged in Europe, and it will be important to put out staff views on this issue. In that context, publication as an SDN is appropriate, given the high profile nature and relevance of the topic—much like the Banking Union paper done a few months ago.
Revisiting the Economic Case for Fiscal Union in the Euro Area
The paper makes an analytical contribution to the revived discussion about the euro area’s institutional setup. After significant progress during the euro crisis, the drive to complete Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) had stalled, and the way forward will benefit from an in-depth look at the conceptual issues raised by the evolution and architecture of Europe, and the tradeoffs involved. A thorough look at the underlying economic issues suggests that in the long run, EMU will benefit from progressing along three mutually supporting tracks: introduce more fiscal risk sharing, helping to make the sovereign “no bailout” rule credible; complementary financial sector reforms to delink sovereigns and banks; and more effective rules to discourage moral hazard. This evolution would ensure that financial markets provide incentives for fiscal discipline. Introducing more fiscal union comes with myriad legal, technical, operational, and political problems, raising questions well beyond the remit of economics. But without decisive progress to foster fiscal risk sharing, EMU will continue to face existential risks.
Dissecting Saving Dynamics
We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate’s long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s - 2007), and recent substantial increase (2008 - 2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious ‘buffer stock’ model of optimal consumption in the presence of labor income uncertainty and credit constraints. Saving in the model is affected by the gap between ‘target’ and actual wealth, with the target wealth determined by credit conditions and uncertainty. An estimated structural version of the model suggests that increased credit availability accounts for most of the saving rate’s long-term decline, while fluctuations in net wealth and uncertainty capture the bulk of the business-cycle variation.
Finance and Development, September 2016
This issue of Finance & Development focuses on how technology is driving growth. The issue looks at “transmission channels.” As with drive-through tellers, ever-more-powerful technology allows us to streamline, replacing less efficient practices (the drive-through teller) with more efficient ones (smartphone deposits). Other articles in this issue cover package chronicle technology’s power to transform: Sanjiv Ranjan Das examines big data’s influence on economics and finance; Aditya Narain documents the rise of a new breed of hybrid financial technology—fintech—firms; and Sharmini Coorey touts distance learning for better policymaking. The issue also examines the impact of remittances on monetary policy, de-dollarization in Peru, and the efficacy of public-private partnerships, among other topics. It also presents profile of Nancy Birdsall, the former head of the Center for Global Development, who has dedicated her career to fighting poverty and inequality through compelling research.
Inflation in Emerging and Developing Economies
This is the first comprehensive study in the context of EMDEs that covers, in one consistent framework, the evolution and global and domestic drivers of inflation, the role of expectations, exchange rate pass-through and policy implications. In addition, the report analyzes inflation and monetary policy related challenges in LICs. The report documents three major findings: In First, EMDE disinflation over the past four decades was to a significant degree a result of favorable external developments, pointing to the risk of rising EMDE inflation if global inflation were to increase. In particular, the decline in EMDE inflation has been supported by broad-based global disinflation amid rapid in...
Macro-Hedging for Commodity Exporters
This paper uses a dynamic optimization model to estimate the welfare gains of hedging against commodity price risk for commodity-exporting countries. The introduction of hedging instruments such as futures and options enhances domestic welfare through two channels. First, by reducing export income volatility and allowing for a smoother consumption path. Second, by reducing the country''s need to hold foreign assets as precautionary savings (or by improving the country''s ability to borrow against future export income). Under plausibly calibrated parameters, the second channel may lead to much larger welfare gains, amounting to several percentage points of annual consumption.
The Long Shadow of Informality
A large percentage of workers and firms operate in the informal economy, outside the line of sight of governments in emerging market and developing economies. This may hold back the recovery in these economies from the deep recessions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic--unless governments adopt a broad set of policies to address the challenges of widespread informality. This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the extent of informality and its implications for a durable economic recovery and for long-term development. It finds that pervasive informality is associated with significantly weaker economic outcomes--including lower government resources to combat recessions, lower per capita incomes, greater poverty, less financial development, and weaker investment and productivity.
Economic Dynamics, second edition
The second edition of a rigorous and example-driven introduction to topics in economic dynamics that emphasizes techniques for modeling dynamic systems. This text provides an introduction to the modern theory of economic dynamics, with emphasis on mathematical and computational techniques for modeling dynamic systems. Written to be both rigorous and engaging, the book shows how sound understanding of the underlying theory leads to effective algorithms for solving real-world problems. The material makes extensive use of programming examples to illustrate ideas, bringing to life the abstract concepts in the text. Key topics include algorithms and scientific computing, simulation, Markov models...
Global Waves of Debt
The global economy has experienced four waves of rapid debt accumulation over the past 50 years. The first three debt waves ended with financial crises in many emerging market and developing economies. During the current wave, which started in 2010, the increase in debt in these economies has already been larger, faster, and broader-based than in the previous three waves. Current low interest rates mitigate some of the risks associated with high debt. However, emerging market and developing economies are also confronted by weak growth prospects, mounting vulnerabilities, and elevated global risks. A menu of policy options is available to reduce the likelihood that the current debt wave will end in crisis and, if crises do take place, will alleviate their impact.
Safe Havens, Feedback Loops, and Shock Propagation in Global Asset Prices
We create a network of bilateral correlations of changes in sovereign bond yields and individual bank equity price changes since 2000. We extract some stylized facts from this network of asset price correlations and document the clear differences in asset price correlations between safe havens and non-safe havens: safe havens, as commonly defined, have higher sovereign-sovereign, bank-bank, and bank-sovereign correlations than nonsafe havens. In a simple shock propagation model, we illustrate how these higher correlations may turn safe havens into shock propagators. While we discuss safe havens as a group, we document how the US is in a category of its own, differing significantly from the other countries including Switzerland or Japan. Separately, we find that feedback loops amplify shocks, and those emanating from bank stress more than those emanating from sovereign stress.
