金融发展对国际收支的影响:基于政府治理的视角

近年来的全球失衡突出表现在美国持续收支逆差和新兴市场国家以及石油输出国持续顺差之间的矛盾,但是传统理论无法完全解释这一失衡现象。基于金融全球化加深的事实,我们重点考察金融发展是否加剧了国际收支失衡。我们将金融发展对国际收支失衡的影响按照传导机制的思路进行解释,并利用1994～2004年81个国家的数据进行了全球范围的实证研究,我们发现,这种传导机制的作用是非常显著的,并且这种显著性受制于各国的政府治理发展状况,所以传导作用因国而异,在发达国家、东亚新兴市场以及其他发展中国家的影响不同。因此,单个国家(如中国)并不是导致当前失衡的主要原因,失衡的中国责任论是不成立的。     

中国经常账户失衡的深层次原因探析——美国金融霸权视角

我国经常账户已连续十多年保持顺差，近几年更是呈现出逐渐升高的态势。金融霸权作为美国长期维持大量贸易逆差和资本流入的基础，正是我国出现巨额顺差的深层次原因。中国经常项目顺差是美国金融优势、强势美元政策和国家根本利益在国际收支账户上的集中表现，是由金融霸权决定的利益分配格局。在短期，我国必须坚决保护自身比较优势、坚持汇率稳步提升和多渠道消化贸易顺差。而在长期，只有建立起强大的金融产业和实现人民币国际化才能从根本上摆脱对美国金融霸权的依赖，实现我国的经济平衡。     

External adjustments and coordinated exchange rate policy in Asia

In this paper, we estimate structural VAR models with contemporaneous restrictions based on neo-classical and Keynesian theories to investigate whether the cause of current account surpluses for East Asian economies is a “saving glut” or undervalued currencies. Analytical results show that the major determinant of the current account is the real effective exchange rate for all East Asian countries with the exception of China for which the major determinant is domestic GDP. Accordingly, the recently requested revaluation of the Chinese yuan may not be an effective policy for reducing the Chinese current account surplus, and may affect other Asian current accounts. We also investigate whether a Chinese currency revaluation would contribute to the improvement of current account imbalances in East Asia and find that a revaluation would, indeed, improve the current accounts of Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand. Since the trade structures of major East Asian countries are substitutes with that of China, a Chinese currency revaluation might not lead to a decrease in East Asian current account surpluses. Coordination of currency policy among East Asian countries is, therefore, needed to solve the global current account imbalance.     

Knowing when to splurge: Precautionary saving and Chinese-Canadians

Why do household saving rates differ so much across countries? This micro-level question has global implications: countries that systematically “over-save” export capital by running current account surpluses. In recipient countries, interest rates are therefore too low and financial stability is put at risk. Existing theories argue that saving is precautionary; however tests of these theories are limited to cross-country comparisons and the results are mixed. We report the findings of an original survey experiment. Using a simulated financial saving task implemented online, we compare the saving preferences of a large and diverse sample of Chinese-Canadians with other Canadians. This comparison is instructive given that Chinese-Canadians migrated from, or descend from those who migrated from, a high-saving environment to a low-saving, high-debt environment. We also compare behavior in the presence and absence of a simulated “welfare state”, which we represent in the form of mandatory insurance. Our respondents exhibit behavior in the saving task that corresponds to standard economic assumptions about lifecycle savings and risk-aversion. We find strong evidence that precautionary saving is reduced when a mandatory insurance is present, but no sign that Chinese cultural influences, represented in either linguistic or ethnic terms, have any effect on saving behavior. Overall, the results suggest that Chinese “over-saving” is likely to be addressed when more generous welfare state policies are put in place.     

New Estimates of the United States–China BilateralTrade Balances

The United States and China have vastly different official estimates of the bilateral trade imbalance. The U.S. figures show that the United States had a merchandise trade deficit of US$68.7 billion vis-à-vis China in 1999 whereas the Chinese figures show that China had a merchandise trade surplus of only US$22.4 billion vis-à-vis the United States. There is a difference of US$46.3 billion. Which set of figures is right? It turns out that neither side is completely right. Various factors, such as f.o.b.–c.i.f. adjustments and treatments of re-exports and re-export markups, complicate the measurement of the bilateral trade balance between the United States and China. One important conclusion that emerges is that while U.S. trade statistics may be more reliable than Chinese trade statistics, even they are not completely accurate. By explicitly taking into account the aforementioned factors, the discrepancy between the adjusted U.S. and Chinese data on the bilateral trade balance in 1999 is narrowed from US$46.3 billion to US$4.8 billion, or approximately 10% of the initial figure. Our best estimate for the true U.S.–China bilateral merchandise trade balance for 1999 is US$47.8 billion, in China's favor. If we take into account the trade in services, in which the United States has traditionally enjoyed a surplus, the U.S.–China bilateral trade balance may be estimated at approximately US$45 billion in 1999. Compared with the U.S. trade deficit with Japan (over US$70 billion in 1999), the U.S.–China trade deficit, appropriately adjusted, is still significantly smaller. J. Japan. Int. Econ., March 2001, 15(1), pp. 102–130. Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064; and Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-6072. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: F10, F13.     

人口结构变迁与经常账目失衡

世界范围内持续多年的经常账目失衡并不鲜见,以往研究多关注汇率和净出口的关系,而忽视了经常账目余额的另外一种属性——本国在外国的储蓄。本文尝试从人口结构变迁的角度对这一问题给出新的解释。本文通过构建包括幼年抚养比和老年抚养比的世代交替模型,理论分析和预测了：幼年抚养比上升会降低储蓄率、增加投资率,从而减少经常账目余额;而老年抚养比下降会提高储蓄率,增加经常账目余额;试图填补人口结构对经常账目影响的理论空白。接下来,本文利用1990年至2011年全球110个国家的强平衡面板数据进行实证分析,在静态和动态模型下均得到了与理论预测相一致的稳健结果。根据实证结果进行定量分析,本文发现中国抚养比的变化可以解释1990年至2007年间经常账目余额占GDP比重16.6%的变动。     

An evaluation of the saving,investment, and current account balances of five ASEAN economies

This paper evaluates the saving, investment and current account balances (CABs) of five ASEAN economies: Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines over the period 1976 to 1997. The method is to apply a calibrated representative agent model of optimal saving and investment to each of these economies. The model generates optimal saving, investment and CABs for each year from 1976 to 1997 and these are compared with the actual balances. The results suggest that three of the ASEAN countries—Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand—had below-optimal current account ratios (to GDP) on average over the period 1976 to 1997, for most reasonable values of parameters. This was the result of over-investment for Malaysia and Thailand and under-saving by the Philippines. For Singapore and, to a lesser extent Indonesia, the reverse applies—their current account ratios were above-optimal on average due to over-saving.     

Financial Deregulation and the Bank Lending Channel in Developing Countries: The Case of Indonesia

The dominant role of commercial banks as a source of finance and the considerable asymmetry of information in financial markets in developing countries have raised an argument that the bank lending channel of monetary transmission mechanism would be very important in such countries. This study addresses the issue by investigating empirically whether there are differential effects of monetary policy on banks' balance sheets, and its implications to the existence of the bank lending channel of monetary policy in Indonesia, especially since the early 1980s when the government adopted a policy of financial deveculation. We find significant differences of balance sheet behaviour across bank classes in response to a change in monetary policy, consistent with the predictions of the bank lending view. We also found that because of access to foreign funds and the existence of bank loan commitment, the monetary policy was unable to constrain loan supply by the large (state) banks, indicating that the bank lending channel operates through smaller (non-state) banks.     

The Euro-area Financial System: Structure, Integration, and Policy Initiatives

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper providesan overview of the current structure and integration of theeuro-area financial systems and related policy initiatives.We first compare the euro-area financial structure with thoseof the United States and Japan. Using new and comprehensivefinancial account data, we also describe how the euro-area financialstructure has evolved since 1995. We document the progress towardsintegration of the major euro-area financial segments, namelymoney markets, bond markets, equity markets, and banking. Finally,we discuss recent policy initiatives aimed at further improvingEuropean financial integration.     

Why Has China's Current Account Balance Converged after the Global Financial Crisis?

China's current account surplus declined significantly from its peak of nearly 10 percent of GDP in 2007 to less than 1 percent in 2018. The new pattern offered fresh evidence for our understanding of China's current account dynamics. In this paper, we used flow of funds data to gauge its underlying driving forces. Specifically, by employing index decomposition analysis, we decomposed the current account from the perspective of savings and investment into three sectors: the household, corporate, and government sectors. We found that the decline in China's current account ratio was first driven by cyclical factors, i.e. weak corporate saving growth induced by the economic slump in 2009 as well as the following massive corporate investment bolstered by the government stimulus plan. However, such cyclical factors quickly subsided, and the subsequent current account balance reduction was later supported by structural factors, i.e. household savings declined enduringly and the Chinese government switched to a more expansionary fiscal policy. There are three possible explanations for the structural movement: reduced precautionary saving due to higher social security coverage ratio, lower corporate profits as a result of economic slowdown, and a twin deficit due to the government's more relaxed fiscal stance. The new facts, however, were not consistent with other current account theories focusing on long‐term aspects of the saving–investment account puzzle, especially those relating to China's special demographic characteristics.     

Financial crises,Asian stock indices,and current accounts: An Asian-U.S. comparative study

This paper investigates the effects of financial crises-based exchange rate, real interest rate, and personal consumption expenditure on stock market indices and balances of current account in four Asian countries/areas, and the U.S. from 1997 to 2010. Results obtained from Sims's first-order DSGE representation suggest that two policy variables – changes in the exchange rate and changes in the real interest rate lagged by one quarter – act as stabilizers for contemporaneous changes in stock indices for Thailand, Malaysia, and the U.S., but as destabilizers for Taiwan and Hong Kong. However, changes in personal consumption expenditure lagged by one quarter only play a destabilizing role in Hong Kong. For contemporaneous changes in the current account balance, all three policy variables become destabilizers for all five countries except the one-quarter lagged change in real interest rate, which acts as a stabilizer in Malaysia.     

Tales from the Bretton Woods

An analogy has been made between the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the recent Eurozone crisis. The build up of TARGET balances in the Eurosystem of Central Banks after 2007 with the GIPS (deficit countries having large liabilities) and Germany (a surplus country) with large claims is seen as similar to the rising and persistent balance of payments deficits and declining gold reserves by the United States as center country of the BWS gold dollar standard in the 1960s. This paper argues that a better Bretton Woods analogy is between the UK which ran persistent balance of payments deficits reflecting low productivity growth and overly expansionary financial policies (an analogy to the GIPS) countries with West Germany which ran persistent balance of payments surpluses reflecting high productivity and conservative financial policies (analogous to Germany today). However Bretton Woods is very different from the Eurozone in many dimensions. An even better analogy than BWS is a comparison of the clearing mechanism in the U.S..--The Gold Settlement account—with the Target payments mechanism for the Eurozone. In the early 1930s massive gold flows from the interior, hard hit by banking panics, to New York City were similar to the payments imbalances within the Eurozone in the recent crisis. The Federal Reserve did little to accommodate the demands for liquidity leading to a collapse of the payments system in March 1933. By contrast the build up of TARGET reflected full accommodation of the liquidity demands of the member states. TARGET represented an institutional innovation that prevented a repeat of the 1930s payments crisis.     

Terms of Trade Shocks and the Current Account: Evidence from Five Industrial Countries

What is the effect of shocks to the terms of trade on a country's current account position? The Harberger-Laursen-Metzler effect predicts that an adverse shock to the terms of trade will worsen the current account balance; in contrast, the prediction of intertemporal models of the current account is dependent on the duration of the shock. This paper examines several features of the terms of trade series of five OECD countries, and the relationship between terms of trade shocks and the current account balance. Median shocks to the terms of trade are found to be highly persistent, yet with a large transitory component, and to account for only a small share of the variability of current account balances in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In contrast, terms of trade shocks are found to account for a relatively large proportion of the variability of current account balances in Australia and New Zealand.

     

Central bank communication and correlation between financial markets: Canada and the United States

We study the correlation between pairs of bond and stock markets in Canada and the United States between January 1998 and December 2009 in the framework of diagonal-BEKK models. Our research question is whether monetary policy actions and communications by the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve significantly affect the conditional co-movement of financial markets (i) within Canada and (ii) between Canada and the United States. We find that central bank communication significantly increases the correlation of financial markets within and across the two countries and is particularly important for the correlation of Canadian and US long-term interest rates.     

Norwegian seter-farming

Abstract

This article compares financial groups in Japan and Sweden in order to examine functional and structural changes and continuities since the 1980s. The main question is to what extent controlling blocks and symbiotic relationships to banks have faded away in favor of arm's length distance between actors and a more market-oriented system reminiscent of those in the United Kingdom and the United States. The article gives an insight into how the industrial finance system in Japan and Sweden have responded to the deregulation of the credit market in the 1980s, the financial and industrial crises in the early 1990s and early twenty-first century, and the globalization of markets and businesses. The choice of Japan and Sweden is motivated by the fact that these countries by tradition have been two of the strongest representatives of a control-oriented industrial finance system in the world. In this article, a diachronic and synchronic comparative analysis is used, with focus on four distinctive parameters of the industrial finance system: ownership and control, bank relationships, crisis management and personal networks. The article draws on empirical findings from a variety of sources, including archives.     

服务贸易、非对称开放与全球失衡:一项跨国的经验研究

文章从贸易内部结构出发，分析非对称开放条件下，服务贸易兴起与全球失衡之间的关系。并利用全球59个主要贸易国家2000-2014年双边贸易数据对两者之间的关系进行计量分析，实证结果显示：第一，服务贸易净值与经常账户余额之间存在显著的负向关系，服务贸易净值提高100万美元，经常账户余额减少98.7万美元。在引入交互项之后这种关系依然显著成立。因此，服务贸易的非对称开放是造成全球失衡的重要原因。第二，技术进步和利率上调可以扭转服务贸易对经常账户的抑制作用。第三，金融危机之后，服务贸易和经常账户的负向关系进一步强化。后危机时代，全球失衡现象有可能继续恶化。第四，分位数回归发现，在低点位处服务贸易净值对经常账户的影响更为强烈。文章的研究为理解中国的服务贸易逆差提供了新的视角，并为扭转服务贸易逆差奠定了理论基础。     

Demographic changes, saving, and current account: An analysis based on a panel VAR model

This paper empirically investigates the macroeconomic effects of demographic changes, focusing on saving rates and current account balances. The econometric investigation based on the panel VAR model shows substantial demographic effects on national saving rates and current account balances in the major advanced (G-7) countries. An increase in the dependency rate significantly lowers saving rates, especially public saving rates. Further, a higher dependency rate significantly worsens current account balances.     

Bilateralism and Regionalism in Japanese and U.S. Trade and Direct Foreign Investment Patterns

We apply a modified "gravity model" incorporating measures of factor endowments to analyze Japanese and U.S. bilateral trade flows and direct foreign investment positions with a sample of around 100 countries for the period 1985–1990. Country features that our analysis takes into account are population, income, the land–labor ratio, the average level of education, and region. We find that features of a country associated with more trade with either Japan or the United States also tend to be associated with more direct foreign investment (DFI) from Japan or the United States. U.S. economic relations with Japan and Western Europe provide an important exception. Despite U.S. concern about its trade deficit with Japan, we find Japan to be much more open to the United States, not only as a source of imports, but also as a destination for U.S. exports than most countries in Western Europe. Taking other factors into account, however, Western Europe is more open to U.S. direct foreign investment. We also find that a country′s level of education tends to increase significantly U.S. interaction of all types with that country, even after correcting for per capita income. Education does not play a significant role in Japanese trade patterns. As factor endowment theory would predict, the United States tends to trade more with densely populated countries, while Japan tends to import more from sparsely populated countries. Even after taking into account population, income, factor endowments, and region, there is a substantial degree of "bilateralism" in Japanese and U.S. economic relationships in that the residual correlation among exports, imports, and outward direct foreign investment is much larger than would be the case if these magnitudes were independent across countries. J. Japan. Int. Econ. December 1994, 8(4), pp. 478–510. Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215; and National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.     

美国金融监管改革方案及其对我国的启示

全球金融危机的爆发,暴露出美国旧的金融监管体制漏洞百出。由此,2009年6月奥巴马政府出台了美国自上世纪30年代以来规模最大的金融改革方案。该方案不仅对于美国,而且对国际金融监管体系将产生重大影响,其中一些建议和措施尤其值得理论界关注和思考。本文追溯了美国金融监管体制改革的历史变迁,考察了美国现有金融监管体制的特点和缺陷,并结合此次金融监管改革方案的内容,深入分析其特征及存疑之处,并得出对完善我国金融监管体制的若干启示。     

Three current account balances: A “Semi-Structuralist” interpretation

Three current account imbalances – one very large deficit (the United States) and two surpluses (Japan and the Euro area) – are subjected to a minimalist structural interpretation. Though simple, this interpretation enables us to assess how much of each of the imbalances require a real exchange rate adjustment. According to the estimates, a large part of the U.S. current account deficit (nearly 2 percentage points of the 2006 deficit of 5(1/2)% of GDP) will undergo an adjustment process that involves real depreciation in its exchange rate. For Japan, a little more than 1 percentage point (of GDP) of the current account surplus is found to require an exchange rate movement (real appreciation) as the surpluses adjust down. For the Euro area, less than half a percentage point of its current account surplus is found to require an adjustment via real appreciation.