Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 56 No 3 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the impact of trade openness on growth are based either on crosscountry analysis—which lacks transparency—or case studies—which lack statistical rigor. This paper applies a transparent econometric method drawn from the treatment evaluation literature (matching estimators) to make the comparison between treated (that is, open) and control (that is, closed) countries explicit while remaining within a statistical framework. Matching estimators highlight that common cross-country evidence is based on rather far-fetched country comparisons, which stem from the lack of common support of treated and control countries in the covariate space. The paper therefore advocates paying more attention to appropriate sample restriction in crosscountry macro research.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 56 No 4 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-11-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper empirically evaluates four types of costs that may result from an international sovereign default: reputational costs, international trade exclusion costs, costs to the domestic economy through the financial system, and political costs to the authorities. It finds that the economic costs are generally significant but short-lived, and sometimes do not operate through conventional channels. The political consequences of a debt crisis, by contrast, seem to be particularly dire for incumbent governments and finance ministers, broadly in line with what happens in currency crises.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 56 No 1 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special issue brings together world-renowned experts to provide a systematic and critical analysis of the costs and benefits of financial globalization. Contributors include Kenneth Rogoff, Maurice Obstfeld, Dani Rodrik, and Frederic S. Mishkin.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 56 No 2 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s growth performance since the start of economic reforms in 1978 has been impressive, but the gains have not been distributed equally across provinces. We use a nonparametric approach to analyze the variation in labor productivity growth across China’s provinces. This approach imposes less structure on the data than the standard growth accounting framework and allows for a breakdown of labor productivity into efficiency gains, technological progress, and capital deepening. We have the following results. First, we find that on average capital deepening accounts for about 75 percent of total labor productivity growth, while efficiency and technological improvements account for about 7 and 18 percent, respectively. Second, technical change is not neutral. Third, whereas improvement in efficiency contributes to convergence in labor productivity between provinces, technical change contributes to productivity disparity across provinces. Finally, we find that foreign direct investment has a positive and significant effect on efficiency growth and technical progress.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers Volume 46 No 3 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines determinants and leading indicators of banking crises. The paper examines episodes of banking system distress and crisis in a large sample of countries to identify which macroeconomic and financial variables can be useful leading indicators. The best warning signs of the recent Asian crises were proxies for the vulnerability of the banking and corporate sector. Full-blown banking crises are shown to be associated more with external developments, and domestic variables are the main leading indicators of severe but contained banking distress.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1954-01-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper presents a study on economic development with stability in India. While the Five-Year Plan occupies the central position as the means through which the Government of India proposes to deal with the basic economic problem, it must be implemented by many specific economic and social measures. It is of the utmost importance that the measures taken in various fields should not only contribute to the fulfilment of the Five-Year Plan but that they should form part of a consistent economic and social policy. Apart from the change in total foreign investment, the composition of foreign investment in India now includes a larger proportion of direct and a smaller proportion of fixed interest obligations than before the war. While India's official sterling debt has been practically wiped out, the Government of India has incurred new obligations in dollars. If India could meet its pre-war obligations on foreign investment without any great strain on its balance of payments, it should be able to meet future obligations, resulting from any new debts, provided its balance of payments position in the future is not materially worse than in the past.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the middle of 1985 Argentina and Israel launched frontal attacks on inflation which succeeded in reducing it drastically during the first year without very significant costs in employment and output. Despite basic differences in the countries’ structures, the programs were similar in their design and their effects. This paper covers some of these similarities in the implementation and the results of the two stabilization programs, and analyzes the rationale of the underlying conception of the plans. The focus is on the strategy for the transitional period, and the ability of the programs to sustain price stability.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposal to set up an international debt facility to buy the debt of developing countries at a discount and then mark down its contractual value is analyzed. The paper considers the central question of how the debtor countries, creditor banks, and owners of the facility would be affected; in particular, what redistribution of gains and losses there would be among them. The “market price effect” and the “ceiling effect” are distinguished. A crucial consideration is whether debt retained by banks is subordinated to debt bought by the facility.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1974-01-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper constructs three simple model of the financial effects on countries in different situations of the various arrangements regarding reserve supply that were discussed during the recent negotiations on reform of the international monetary system. Much of the analysis is devoted to an identification of the conflicting factors that determine the financial impact on a country of the possible arrangements considered. It is demonstrated that nonreserve centers have a financial interest in the existence of convertibility and in the absence of holding limits for primary assets, while the converse is true for a reserve center. Another clear-cut conclusion is that net users of special drawing rights (SDR) have a financial interest in increasing the role of the SDR by means of restrictions on reserve composition rather than by means of an increased SDR yield, while the reverse is true of countries with SDR holdings in excess of allocations.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper focuses on problems of economic policy in terms of targets and instruments. Both the fixed-targets approach and the welfare-economics approach tend to favor a multiplication of policy instruments, the former so as to increase the number of targets that can be attained and the latter so as to permit all objectives to be more closely approximated. It is necessary that policies be centrally coordinated, and in each country, there is a limit to the number of policies that can be successfully coordinated by the political and administrative machine. For this reason, the costs of applying any given policy instrument will depend not only on the degree of its use but also on the number and nature of the instruments already in use. The existence of both kinds of cost, and particularly the latter, will set a limit on the number of policy instruments that can appropriately be brought into operation.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1952-01-01 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper focuses on the relation of inflation to economic development. Due to the inadequacy of savings and the difficulty of directing them into productive investment, there is a strong temptation to raise the level of investment by expanding bank credit—that is, by inflation. In most low-income countries, even the most forceful measures for increasing savings and for applying them to the most urgent needs would still leave the economy with inadequate resources for the investment necessary to assure tolerable progress in raising productive efficiency and expanding production. The only way of securing adequate resources for development in such countries is by supplementing domestic savings with capital from abroad. It is characteristic of the underdeveloped countries that the resources they put into investment are generally a smaller proportion of their very much smaller national product than is true for the more highly developed countries. The proportionally low level of investment in underdeveloped countries may be due to various factors. Frequently, though not universally, the cause of inadequate investment is the unavailability of savings.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1965-01-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from this paper were delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 8, 1965.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1957-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a part of the proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund, an Informal Session on “Recent Developments in Monetary Analysis” was held on September 25, 1956. The three papers which were presented at that Session by Dr. M. W. Holtrop, President of De Nederlandsche Bank, Dr. Paolo Baffi, Economic Adviser to Banca d’Italia, and Dr. Ralph A. Young, Director of the Division of Research and Statistics, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, are reproduced below, together with the background paper, “Monetary Analyses,” prepared by the Statistics Division of the Research and Statistics Department of the International Monetary Fund.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 48 No 3 written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2002-01-18 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the financial implications of the 1956 crisis of nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt. It examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy. The paper quantifies the impact of changes in the U.S. monetary policy on sovereign bond spreads in emerging market countries. Specifically, the paper explores empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital markets. Modeling the IMF’s statistical discrepancy in the global current account is also discussed.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1971-01-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses the implications for credit policy of changes in the income velocity of money; it neglects other policy elements of financial programs unless they have a direct bearing on velocity changes. Control over credit expansion by domestic banks is used to influence expenditure decisions, since the availability of credit has a strong impact on expenditures on domestic and foreign goods and services and, possibly, on net capital flows and, therefore, on the balance of payments. The paper also describes some relationships between monetary and national income accounts in order to identify the changes in velocity that must be considered in determining credit policies. The relevance of incorporating lags into the demand for money function has been mentioned earlier. Lags in the formation of expectations within a country usually can be expected to change only slowly over time and, therefore, can be assumed constant in the estimation of the demand for money function.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1960 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper explores the role of the IMF in promoting price stability. The IMF has one of its major objectives is to eliminate exchange restrictions that are due to balance of payments reasons. It carries on extensive annual consultations with its members toward that end; and, once the post-war transition is at an end, these members cannot impose exchange restrictions on current transactions without the approval of the Fund. This paper has consistently dealt with the IMF in its role of helping members to avoid inflation. Inflation is the subject of our meeting; and, in the post-war world as it has in fact developed, inflation, latent or realized, has been the perennial problem. Recessions have been short lived. Wherever a member is under pressure, either from external causes such as shrinkage in its foreign markets or from its own policies at home, the IMF stands ready to help it through its period of adjustment. Also with the notable strengthening of its resources that is now in the mill, it should prove to be an even more powerful bulwark against deflation. In such a world, those major countries that are maintaining the most stable and orderly price systems will set the standard to which others must repair.
Download or read book IMF Staff papers written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1966-01-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper explores trends in payment imbalances between 1952 and 1964. When desired reserves deviate appreciably from actual holdings, the authorities will sooner or later readjust their economic policies to reduce the magnitude of the deviation. On the assumption that the priorities given in individual countries to domestic and external objectives of economic policy and the attitudes toward the use of various policy instruments remain unchanged, desired reserves would tend to rise chiefly as a result of the increase in the size of expected payments fluctuations. International reserves of all 65 countries of the study rose over the period studied by 2.5 per cent a year. This low rate of increase reflects, however, the large reduction in US reserves. For all countries of the study excluding the United States, the reserves grew by 6.0 per cent a year. Leaving aside the loss of reserves by the United States, reserves of all countries appear, therefore, to have grown roughly in proportion to the value of trade and to the size of payments imbalances.
