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Australia
This Selected Issues paper on Australia discusses prospects and ramifications of China’s economic transition. Australia and China have strong linkages that are growing over time as China carries on with its economic transition. Trade in commodities and services are constantly growing. Australia has established itself as a dominant player in some key Chinese import needs, particularly for steel. The stylized facts also demonstrate that the rest of Asia is increasingly important for Australia. The charts for tourism, education, and the destination of exports illustrate that both advanced and emerging Asia already have a growing impact. The paper shows that the rest of Asia’s trade linkages with Australia are similar in size to the linkages between Australia and China. China may be Australia’s largest trading partner, but the rest of Asia is also a rapidly growing region, with potential markets for Australian expansion.
Balancing Protection and Opportunity
The conversion from planned to market economies spawned new opportunities and challenges in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Since the social safety nets of guaranteed employment and retirement security disintegrated, the transition governments are trying to develop new social protection systems or adapt the old ones to emerging welfare needs and fiscal realities. Political upheavals, macroeconomic instability, and the difficulty of implementing reforms have hampered progress. Thus the World Bank needs to address social protection issues to inform future Bank activities. To that end, this report presents a social protection strategy for transition economies rooted in three pillars of analysis: a conceptual framework based on risk management, an understanding of the context, challenges, and choices in each country, and Bank experience in social protection in the region.
New Zealand
This paper presents an assessment of the stability of the financial system in New Zealand. Imbalances in the housing market, banks’ concentrated exposures to the dairy sector, and their high reliance on wholesale offshore funding are the key macro-financial vulnerabilities. The banking sector has significant exposure to real estate and agriculture, is relatively dependent on foreign funding, and is dominated by four Australian subsidiaries. A sharp decline in the real estate market, a reversal of the recent recovery in dairy prices, deterioration in global economic conditions, and tightening in financial markets would adversely impact the system. Despite these vulnerabilities, the banking system is resilient to severe shocks. Strengthening the macroprudential framework is important.
Japan
This Selected Issues paper assesses the relationship between demographic trends and housing prices in Japan. Among various issues in the context of regional disparities, the paper focus on regional differences in population dynamics to try and understand to what extent demographic trends have influenced housing market prices in Japan in the past twenty years. Large cities, notably the Greater Tokyo area, are experiencing net migration inflows, while other regions are experiencing net migration outflows. Due to the durability of housing compared to other forms of investment, the magnitude of house price declines associated with population losses is larger than that of house price increases associated with population gains. These model-based predictions are likely to underestimate the actual fall in house prices associated with future population losses, as expectations of lower housing prices in the future could trigger more population outflows and disposal of houses, especially in rural areas. The paper suggests policy measures to help close regional disparities and avoid potential over-investment by taking account of demographic trends for housing supply.
The Rich and the Great Recession
Most papers explaining the macro causes of the U.S. Great Recession focus on the behavior of the middle class: how its saving rate declined in the pre-crisis years, then surged following the crisis. This paper argues that the saving rate of the rich followed a similar pattern, the result of wealth effects associated with a boom-bust in asset prices. Indeed, the swings in saving by the rich must actually have played the most important role in the consumption boom-bust, since since the top 10 percent account for almost half of income and two-thirds of wealth. In other words, the rich played a critical role in the Great Recession.
New Zealand
This 2017 Article IV Consultation highlights New Zealand’s economic expansion, which since early 2011 gained further broad-based momentum in 2016. GDP growth accelerated to 4 percent, and the output gap has roughly closed. Reconstruction spending after the 2011 Canterbury earthquake was an important catalyst, but the expansion has also been supported by accommodative monetary policy, a net migration wave, improving services exports, and strong terms of trade. There was some weakening of momentum in the fourth quarter of 2016, owing to softer private consumption and a sharp drop in exports, but it is expected to be temporary. Growth should rebound and then moderate toward trend in the medium term, in particular as net migration normalizes.
Austria
The 2015 Article IV Consultation discusses the key issues related to the economy of Austria. Austria has recovered from the global financial crisis, but the crisis still remains in bank and public sector balance sheets. Major banks have been striving to strengthen their capital and profitability positions amid regulatory and supervisory reforms. Despite lackluster growth, economic slack is limited as potential growth has fallen as well. The governing coalition of Social Democrats and the right-of-center People's Party holds a constructive dialogue on economic policy issues. Growth is estimated at 0.7 percent in 2015, a slight improvement over the 1⁄2 percent average in 2012–14, on the back of strengthening external and domestic demand.
Employment and the Great Recession
This paper argues that the sharp increase in unemployment in a number of advanced countries during the Great Recession was not just cyclical (the result of a lack of aggregate demand); the degree of adjustment of real wages and the impact this had on labor productivity also played a role. In many countries, post-2007 employment losses were modest, as real wages adjusted when the economy slowed down. But in some countries real wage growth stayed too high for too long. The result was large-scale labor shedding, which boosted labor productivity but also contributed to a sharp rise in unemployment. In this context, the paper discusses the different experiences of the UK (where employment increased) and Spain (where it fell sharply), and finds that almost two thirds of the employment losses in Spain resulted from the failure of real wages to adjust adequately.
Macroeconomic Policies for EU Accession
What macroeconomic requirements must Turkey meet in its quest to accede to the European Union? This book, with its distinguished contributors - well-known economists and policymakers - examines and analyses these macroeconomic challenges confronting Turkey. Although the focus is on the specific situation of Turkey, the lessons are informative for other candidate countries and the findings directly relevant to the process of European integration. The book is divided into four parts: fiscal policies and sustainability of public finances, monetary policy challenges, preconditions for euro adoption, sustainable regimes of capital movements. Each topic is studied in two consecutive papers concentrating first on the challenges faced by the countries of the EU, and then by Turkey. Several papers review the experiences from the previous round of EU accession and the implications of these for Turkey. Macroeconomic Policies for EU Accession will appeal to policymakers, bureaucrats and academics interested in the macroeconomic problems of EU accession and European integration.
Austria
Austria has relatively strong macroeconomic fundamentals, but also deep ties with the rest of the euro area. The legacy of an overly ambitious eastward financial sector expansion has created substantial challenges to its policymakers. Policies have been designed to preserve market confidence, increase resilience against future adverse external spillovers, and boost potential growth. The Austrian supervisory authorities have also introduced a set of macroprudential guidelines to strengthen the resilience of the banking sector. However, improvements in the fiscal governance framework have not advanced as expected.
