Global uncertainties and portfolio flow dynamics of the BRICS countries

This paper investigates the dynamics of bond and stock market capital flows to BRICS countries under uncertainties such as global economic policy uncertainty and the US trade policy uncertainty. We use a time-varying Granger causality framework over the January 2008-November 2019 period to analyze the predictive power of uncertainties on capital flows in the form of bond and equity. The results show that the effects are heterogeneous across countries and stronger during the Global Financial Crisis period and post-2018 period while it lost its significance in the subsequent period. The negative influence of uncertainties on capital flows directed to BRICS countries is also evident in the results of non-parametric time-varying panel models. Overall, it is thought that the heterogeneous structure of the causality between uncertainty and portfolio flows into BRICS may present portfolio diversification benefits for global investors.     

政治冲突与国际贸易:韩国萨德事件对中韩贸易的影响分析

运用双重差分模型,依据中韩两国产品贸易数据,考量萨德事件对中韩贸易的影响。结果表明：萨德事件引发的中国消费者抵制运动使得韩国向中国的出口损失幅度达到近30%,受影响的产品主要集中在替代性较高的日常生活消费品领域,韩国对华电子产品贸易并未受到萨德事件冲突的影响,侧面说明了中国官方表现出相对理性与克制的态度,韩国向中国出口的后果更多地来自民间自发性消费抵制;冲突带来的进口替代效应使得第三方出口国如日本、美国、德国等国家从萨德事件中受益,这些国家扩大了对华出口,但是这种进口替代效应具有短期性,随着时间的推延逐渐消失。     

全球经济新格局与中国企业海外投资机遇与风险

次贷危机以来,全球政治经济格局出现新的变化,以美国为代表的发达经济体在世界经济中的优势地位有所下降,以中国为代表的新兴经济体国力则相对增强,跨国公司全球化战略和供应链体系正经历着一次新的调整,并与世界经济的结构性调整相互交织,这为中国企业向海外拓展提供了良好机遇。与此同时,中国巨额外汇储备也为中国企业进行海外投资提供了坚实的资金基础。但是,海外投资东道国经济增长的放缓也使得国家风险增大,这使得中国企业进行海外投资时面临了一定的风险。     

全球经常项目失衡问题的实证研究

近些年,全球经常项目失衡问题成为经济学家竞相研究的热点问题,并提出了众多不同的观点。本文利用全球范围内52个国家或地区!"1980￣2004年的经济数据对影响经常项目失衡的多种经济因素进行实证研究,就当前分析全球经常项目失衡原因中的一些经济变量对经常项目的影响程度提供了经验分析,并且对解决当前全球经常项目失衡问题提出了相关建议。     

Time-varying linkages between energy and stock markets: Dynamic spillovers and driving factors

Integration between international energy prices and stock market returns is critical for global economics and politics. In this study, we employ a TVP-VAR (time-varying parameter vector autoregression) connectedness decomposition approach to investigate the time-varying linkages between a diversified energy portfolio comprising oil, coal, natural gas, and stock returns in G7 countries and China. This approach allows us to show the dynamic spillovers and explore the driving factors underlying the dynamic patterns. We find that geopolitical risks, global economic policy uncertainties, and equity market volatility can influence cross-market spillovers. This study expounds the effect of energy financialization.     

发展经济学的学派划分及其研究方法

在对经济学界关于经济学学派划分标准进行阐述的基础上,归纳分析了国内外学者关于发展经济学流派的划分观点.学者们普遍接受将发展经济学划分为结构主义经济发展思路、新古典主义经济发展思路、新古典政治经济学思路和激进主义经济发展思路.本文对上述四种思路的研究方法进行了分析,并明确指出上述几种思路研究方法分歧的本质,即“单一经济学”和“双元经济学”之争、发展中国家经济发展的“内因”与“外因”之争、对经济发展进行“纯经济研究”还是进行“社会经济系统研究”之争.     

Lessons from global modelling and modellers

Two key lessons arising from ten years of global modelling are, first, that there are indeed lessons to be learned—eg ‘business as usual’ is not a viable world future, but the will to change economic, political and social structures could indeed create a decent and sustainable standard of living for all; second, many of the lessons are fairly obvious, but there is a great reluctance, even amongst global modellers, to take them into account—eg the real-world importance of politics is rarely represented in models, or the need to take great care not to mislead when publicizing results.     

Managing risk in an unstable world

With emerging markets like China and politically unstable countries like Saudi Arabia figuring more than ever into companies' investment calculations, business leaders are turning to political risk analysis to measure the impact of politics on potential markets, minimize risks, and make the most of global opportunities. But political risk is more subjective than its economic counterpart. It is influenced by the passage of laws, the foibles of government leaders, and the rise of popular movements. So corporate leaders must grapple not just with broad, easily observable trends but also with nuances of society and even quirks of personality. And those hard-to-quantify factors must constantly be pieced together into an ongoing narrative within historical and regional contexts. As goods, services, information, ideas, and people cross borders today with unprecedented velocity, corporations debating operational or infrastructural investments abroad increasingly need objective, rigorous assessments. One tool for measuring and presenting stability data, for example, incorporates 20 composite indicators of risk in emerging markets and scores risk variables according to both their structural and their temporal components. The indicators are then organized into four equally weighted subcategories whose ratings are aggregated into a single stability score. Countries are ranked on a scale of zero (a failed state) to100 (a fully institutionalized, stable democracy). Companies can buy political risk analyses from consultants or, as some large energy and financial services organizations have done, develop them in-house. Either way, a complete and accurate picture of any country's risk requires analysts with strong reportorial skills; timely, accurate data on a variety of social and political trends; and a framework for evaluating the impact of individual risks on stability.     

Dynamics and Politics in Regional Integration Arrangements: An Introduction

Overwhelming evidence links openness and economic growth. Inrecent years many developing countries have attempted to liberalizetheir trade and investment regimes, mostly through autonomousunilateral liberalization. At the same time, a growing numberof governments have begun to explore and participate in regionaltrading agreements. The agreements grant reciprocal trade preferencesto participating countries, resulting in discrimination againstnonmembers. The causes and consequences of regional integration have givenrise to an extensive and vigorous debate among both scholarsand policymakers. However, the quality of this debate has beenseriously hampered by the absence of clear analytical modelsand empirical evidence on many of the factors under discussion.Few of the recent arguments in favor of regional integrationarrangements have been satisfactorily formalized or tested.To address some of these issues, a World Bank research programfocuses on new and developing country aspects of regionalism.The program explores lacunae in the traditional static analysisof regional integration arrangements; addresses the dynamiceffects of integration, the economics of deep integration, andthe politics and political economy of regional integration arrangements;and compares regionalism with multilateralism. The articlesin this symposium address the topics of dynamics, politics,and political economy in regional integration agreements.     

全球价值链中贸易增加值的测度与比较——以中国、俄罗斯、印度三国贸易为例

近年来,以“金砖国家”为代表的新兴经济体已成为全球经济增长的重要引擎和贸易重地,中国、俄罗斯和印度三国作为其核心国家在国际分工中的地位举足轻重。以传统贸易总值法测算中国出口贸易夸大了中国真实的贸易利得,导致中国频频面临贸易摩擦。本文利用世界投入产出表1995—2011年的数据,从增加值贸易角度对三国间的出口额进行国内外增加值分解和测算,对比分析总值贸易和增加值贸易,解释三国贸易趋势和结构特征,进一步了解三国在全球价值链中的地位和作用。实证结果表明,贸易增加值核算方法能更全面和准确反映各国参与国际分工和在国际贸易中的真实获益情况,对中国认清主要贸易合作伙伴、有针对性地制定贸易政策有指导作用。     

Oil shocks and stock market volatility of the BRICS: A GARCH-MIDAS approach

In this study, we employ the GARCH–MIDAS (Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity variant of Mixed Data Sampling) model to investigate the response of stock market volatility of the BRICS group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to oil shocks. We utilise the recent datasets of Baumeister & Hamilton (2019), where oil shocks are decomposed into four variants: oil supply shocks, economic activity shocks, oil consumption shocks, and oil inventory shocks. We further decompose each of these shocks into positive and negative shocks, and our findings show heterogeneous response of stock market volatility of the BRICS countries to the alternative oil shocks, including positive and negative shocks. The differing responses across the BRICS countries could be attributed to differences in the economic size, oil production, and consumption profile of the countries, market share distribution across firms, and financial system and regulation efficiency.     

关于贸易保护政策选择的理论分析

贸易政策选择的纯经济分析并没有为解释现实中的贸易保护主义提供坚实有力的理论依据，这促使经济学着手从政治角度探究现实中贸易保护政策的本质——收入分配问题，以收入分配为主题，将公共选择的一些思想观点引入贸易理论，通过运用政治行为的经济分析，考察政治决策过程中贸易政策的选择和变化，贸易政策的政治经济学由此产生。其基本论点是：贸易政策的制定是国内政治经济诸因素综合作用和各国之间相互作用的结果。     

全球经常项目失衡影响因素的实证研究

近年来,全球经常项目失衡问题成为经济研究者、国际机构和各国中央银行经济学家以及商务经济研究报告竞相研究的热点问题。本文利用全球范围内56个国家或地区1980年至2005年的数据,针对影响经常项目的多种因素进行实证研究,结果表明经常项目与政府财政收支、资本形成率以及开放程度等因素密切相关。在当前全球经济增速放缓的形势下,只有通过有效的国际经济政策协调才能促进全球经常项目失衡问题的有序解决。     

The world price of liquidity risk

This paper empirically tests the liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model of Acharya and Pedersen (2005) on a global level. Consistent with the model, I find evidence that liquidity risks are priced independently of market risk in international financial markets. That is, a security’s required rate of return depends on the covariance of its own liquidity with aggregate local market liquidity, as well as the covariance of its own liquidity with local and global market returns. I also show that the US market is an important driving force of global liquidity risk. Furthermore, I find that the pricing of liquidity risk varies across countries according to geographic, economic, and political environments. The findings show that the systematic dimension of liquidity provides implications for international portfolio diversification.     

Global financial crisis and emerging stock market contagion: A multivariate FIAPARCH–DCC approach

This paper empirically investigates the contagion effects of the global financial crisis in a multivariate Fractionally Integrated Asymmetric Power ARCH (FIAPARCH) dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) framework during the period 1997–2012. We focus on five most important emerging equity markets, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), as well as USA during different phases of the crisis. The length and the phases of the crisis are identified based on both an economic and a statistical approach. The empirical evidence does not confirm a contagion effect for most BRICS during the early stages of the crisis, indicating signs of isolation or decoupling. However, linkages reemerged (recoupled) after the Lehman Brothers collapse, suggesting a shift on investors' risk appetite. Moreover, correlations among all BRICS and USA are increased from early 2009 onwards, implying that their dependence is larger in bullish than in bearish markets. These findings do not show a pattern of contagion for all BRICSs' markets that could be attributed to their common trade and financial characteristics and provide important implications for international investors and policymakers.     

The end of neoliberal history—the future of economics

The future of economics needs discussion both negatively, as the denial of neoliberal perspective, and positively as a science that is able to handle the historic welfare-freedom-culture paradox. The authors state that this alternative is political economy, which they define as a science searching for materialisation of social visions in the economic sphere. This tradition dates back to ancient cultures and does not coincide with the present usage of political economy. The article discusses the political economy of the information age and beyond. The core idea is that the human alternative of ongoing technological changes executes long run visions of mankind: co-existence of freedom and welfare under cultural leadership in a global scale.     

Political Risk as a Determinant of Southern European FDI in Neighboring Developing Countries

This study analyzes foreign direct investment flows from southern European countries to one of two nearby developing regions: north African countries and new European Union member states in central and eastern Europe. As expected, good economic perspectives, human capital, and development of infrastructures attract greater investment flows. However, greater levels of political risk, measured through scales of political discretion, corruption, and economic freedom, do also attract higher inflows. Despite the fact that one might expect global flows to fall as a consequence of political risk, those from the countries in the sample increase, because they come from firms that are searching for a market niche where they can take advantage of their political capabilities.     

Lessons learnt from the mounting non-performing loans in Japan after the 1990s

When the property bubble burst in the 1990s, the corporate and banking sectors in Japan suffered from historically huge losses that resulted in a sluggish economy that lasted nearly 15 years. In 2002, the economy finally bottomed out. By going through this process, Japan learnt many lessons in the fields of economics, sociology, and politics. Two critical lessons that the financial authorities gleaned from this experience are: (1) Disclosure of the current conditions of financial institutions in the early stages is of the utmost importance. Once losses start to mount, disclosure and one-time compensation should trigger a systemic risk. (2) At times when a country is going through a strong economic period, it is important to make preparations for economic stagnation. To ensure that this is successful, the first step is for the public sector to share the understanding of the current economic conditions and the forecasts for its seeable future. It is also important that they disclose this knowledge to other authorities and people to ensure transparency. Those lessons are not so special, rather ordinary. But it is difficult to practice them. The mechanism of the bubble economy and how it burst is not clear yet in economics. But history shows such situations repeat themselves in different ways. In the process of globalisation, excess liquidity in the financial market is invested into too illiquid assets all over the world, especially in the emerging countries and real property market. To know what is happening is critical. But the domestic authorities who supervise financial institutions in the mother market face two difficulties to do it. Owing to the development of IT, the boundary between financial institutions and funds becomes vague and investment money will go freely over cross-border.     

Marketing of banking services in Nigeria

This paper (which was originally presented at the 2001 World Services Congress in Hong Kong, 19–21 September) traces the origins of marketing in Nigerian banking and shows how different economic, social and political environments have influenced the marketing of financial services in Nigeria. It argues that the future of the banking market in Nigeria will, in the main, depend on the ongoing integration of the country into the global market. With the return of the international banks, multinational and foreign companies and missions are likely to favour such banks for their banking transactions. The implication of this is that banks with little or no foreign ownership structures will gradually be forced to concentrate on the indigenous market. Unless the government can put its house in order quickly and ensure a stable macroeconomic environment for economic development, it is likely that market forces will cause several of these indigenous banks to merge their activities or be absorbed by the big international banks.     

A new Bandung? : Economic growth vs. distributive justice among emerging powers

The demographic weight and the scale and magnitude of economic growth in China and India—as well as in Brazil and South Africa—marks a seismological transformation in world politics. However, despite their economic clout, the emerging powers of the global South have done little to challenge the Euro-North American domination of the international stage—leaving that task to Bolivia, Venezuela, and Iran. The reluctance of the large states of the global South to challenge the contemporary world order—and the widening income and wealth inequalities within their borders—suggests that they are increasingly complicit in this new world order. However, as growing inequalities unleash greater political instability, it is in the interests of states in the global South to cooperate with each other to change the rules of the game.