NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD ECONOMY*

The United Nations' newly completed study of purchasing power parities covering 34 countries varied in region, income level, and form of economic organization shows the systematic differences between the usual view of the structure of the world economy arising out of international comparisons based upon foreign exchange rate conversions and the structure one sees when actual prices are available. The real per capita GDP of developing countries is understated relative to developed countries when exchange rates are used in converting countries' national income accounts to a common currency, with the degree of understatement for any two countries being inversely related to the per capita income difference between them. The reason for this is that relative prices in the non-traded goods sector are lower relative to traded goods prices in low income countries. The systematic pattern observed in the 1975 data of the 34 countries has been extrapolated over time and space to get estimates of GDP for other years and countries. In the absence of detailed price data, the real shares of final expenditures devoted to particular components of the total can only be estimated as the proportion of own currency total expenditure devoted to the components. The observed differences in the pattern of prices of poor countries relative to rich for different components makes this clearly wrong for international comparisons, and in systematic ways. For example, (i) the relative price of services compared with commodities in poor countries is lower than in rich; so the apparent tendency of the share of services to rise as a country's income rises disappears when real quantities are considered; similarly, (ii) the relative price of capital goods is greater in poor countries compared with rich ones, so the difference in investment ratios out of GDP between rich and poor countries is understated.     

3F冲击对中国通货膨胀的影响研究

本文选取全球通货膨胀率、国际能源价格、国际食品价格作为3F外部冲击的三个影响因素,应用扩展的菲利普斯曲线实证分析1981年至2011年的外部冲击因素与我国通胀率的长期关系,然后使用VAR模型对这些外部因素所产生的冲击效果做进一步探究。实证结果表明：短期内,全球通货膨胀率是导致国内价格水平上升的主要原因;随着时间的推移,国际能源价格与国际食品价格对于国内价格水平的影响力逐渐增强,且在中长期成为较为重要的影响因素。而通胀预期与产出缺口则是中长期影响物价的最主要因素。因此,为了抵御外部冲击对我国通货膨胀的影响,管理我国对于本国及全球通胀的预期、构建相应的价格缓冲机制、实施农产品进口渠道多元化战略等均是较为有效的手段。与此同时,也要防止经济过快增长,抑制由于投资需求带来的通货膨胀。     

THE IMPACT OF FOOD PRICE SHOCK ON HETEROGENEOUS CREDIT CONSTRAINED FIRMS

ABSTRACT 1 : The paper analyzes how rising food and energy prices affect heterogeneous firm access to inputs and production under credit market imperfections. We estimate a firm credit constraint equation using a unique firm level panel data and find that, on average, small individual firms (IF) are more credit constrained than large corporate firms (CF). Using the estimated parameters, we simulate the effect of the recent food price shock on the world markets. Our results suggest that in the presence of credit market imperfections, the less credit constrained CF benefit relatively more from food price increase than IF, as they are able to expand their production more flexibly. These findings have important policy implications for countries with significant market imperfections. In the case of the food price shock, not only consumers but also producers, which on average are more credit constrained than producers in developed countries, may lose their market shares and hence their income in the long run.     

MEASURES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIVE PRICES FOR CHINA AND THE USA

Abstract.  In this paper we assemble a measure of international relative prices to gauge the average amount by which prices in China and the USA differ from the prices of their trading partners. Our estimated weighted average of relative prices for China and the USA are the first to use the significantly revised purchasing power parities embodied in the price data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. Our analysis reveals several findings of interest. First, interactions between the structure of trade and the levels of relative prices are sufficiently important to induce divergences between the weighted average of relative prices and conventional real effective exchange-rate indexes. Second, revisions embodied in World Development Indicators price data generally lower the estimate of US international relative prices. Third, net exports are inversely related to the estimate of US international relative price, but, for China, the correlation is positive. Estimating this correlation for other countries reveals no systematic pattern related to the level of development alone. Fourth, unlike previous work, using our price measures we find that an increase in US prices relative to Chinese prices raises the share of China's exports to the USA. Finally, there is a distinct possibility of eliminating the long-standing differential in income elasticities of US trade in empirical applications.     

CONSUMER SEARCH,PRICE DISPERSION,AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIVE PRICE FLUCTUATIONS*

This article develops a model of consumer search consistent with the evidence of substantial price dispersion and time spent shopping within countries to study international deviations from the law of one price (LOP) and relative price fluctuations. Search frictions lead firms to price discriminate across markets based on the opportunity cost of search, which depends on the local wage. With productivity and taste shocks estimated from the data, deviations from the LOP are as volatile and persistent as in the data. Fluctuations in relative wages, real exchange rates, and the terms of trade are also consistent with the data.     

The international business cycle as intertemporal coordination failure

Where investments are irreversible and the future is uncertain, people in two countries can make investment decisions that turn out to be mutually inconsistent. I argue that this intertemporal coordination failure explains international business cycles in a two-currency-area setting with a floating foreign exchange rate. The sequence of events starts with an expansionary domestic monetary shock, which decreases the domestic real interest rate. Facing low transactions costs, people spend the new money relatively early in the foreign exchange market and in the foreign market for loanable funds. Domestic monetary expansion thereby changes the relative prices of domestic and foreign goods and also of goods of earlier and later stages of production. The relative price changes lead to intertemporal and international coordination failures once the monetary expansion ends and relative prices change. Domestic monetary policy thereby causes the comovement across different currency areas we observe of business cycles.     

多种要素扭曲是否推动了中国企业出口

本文使用1999-2007年工业企业数据样本分析了包括资本、劳动及中间品在内的要素市场相对扭曲程度,并考察其是否能解释中国企业出口的独特成本优势。结论认为：中国制造业企业存在严重要素价格扭曲,不同要素的价格扭曲程度差异化较大。劳动力价格扭曲现象普遍存在,经济发展以牺牲劳动力价格市场化为代价。国有企业比重较大的行业资本价格相对较低,而私营企业比重较大的行业则资金成本较高。能源、原材料相关行业以及外资企业比重较大的行业中间品价格偏低;经过实证检验,要素市场扭曲的确对企业出口倾向起到推动作用,企业将获得的成本优势转化为出口优势,这表明低廉的要素价格是中国产品在国际市场中具有竞争力的重要原因。     

PRICE SETTING PRACTICES IN GREECE: EVIDENCE FROM A SMALL‐SCALE FIRM‐LEVEL SURVEY

The paper documents the price setting practices followed by some 400 or so firms operating in Greece. Survey replies reveal a low percentage of firms changing prices with frequency higher than annual and staggering of price changes during the year. As to firms’ reactions to unexpected shocks, prices appear to adjust sluggishly to cost shocks with asymmetries in price adjustment across positive and negative shocks. Adjustments to increases in costs appear speedier than those to reductions in demand. The data confirm a result found for other countries: the existence of cross‐sectional variations in price setting strategies and in the extent to which prices are adjusted in reaction to unexpected shocks. The results suggest a positive association between, on the one hand, product market competition and, on the other hand, state‐dependent pricing, frequent price changes and the likelihood of a price adjustment following an adverse demand shock.     

The effects of oil price shocks on expenditure category CPI

In this study, we apply a two-block structural vector autoregressive (VAR) model proposed by Kilian and Park (2009) in order to investigate the dynamic effects of changes in oil price on the expenditure category consumer price index (CPI) in the United States and Japan. Our results confirm that each expenditure category price index responded very differently to the same structural shock, and that whether changes in oil price function as a positive stimulus or a negative shock for the individual expenditure category prices also depends on the kind of underlying shock that drives the changes in oil price. Finally, our results also reveal that the manner in which changes in oil price affect each expenditure category price differs between the United States and Japan and these detailed-level differences may lead to aggregate-level differences in the price response of both countries to changes in oil price.     

OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY WITH THE STICKY INFORMATION MODEL OF PRICE ADJUSTMENT: INFLATION OR PRICE‐LEVEL TARGETING?

I investigate the optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian macroeconomic framework with the sticky information model of price adjustment. The model is solved for optimal policy, and welfare implications of three alternative monetary policy regimes under this optimal policy are compared when there is a cost‐push shock to the economy. These monetary policy regimes are the unconstrained policy, price‐level targeting and inflation targeting regimes. The results illustrate that optimal policy depends on the degree of price stickiness and the persistence of the shock. Inflation targeting emerges as the optimal policy if prices are flexible enough or the shock is persistent enough. However, the unconstrained policy or price‐level targeting might be preferable to inflation targeting if prices are not very flexible and the shock is not very persistent. The results also show that as prices become more flexible, the welfare loss usually gets bigger.     

Impulse response analysis and Orcutt’s hypothesis in trade: evidence from developing countries

Orcutt’s hypothesis in international economics implies that trade flows respond to exchange rate changes faster than to changes in relative prices. Most previous studies used import and export demand models and tested the hypothesis by imposing and comparing lag lengths on the exchange rate and relative prices. One recent study, however, employed impulse response of trade flows to one SD shock to the nominal exchange rate and one SD shock to relative prices and tested the Orcutt’s hypothesis for several industrial countries. In this article we follow this study and test the hypothesis for six developing countries using impulse response analysis. Like the other study for industrial countries, we do not find much support for the hypothesis.     

TERRORISM AND THE RETURNS TO OIL

The effect of terrorism on global oil prices has been largely explained through demand-side effects. We estimate an empirical model to re-examine the effect of terrorism on the price of global oil stocks across oil market regimes that reflect different supply constraints. We believe that terrorism will have larger impacts when global capacity is tight (i.e. when global demand is close to global supply). This means that any shock to capacity (say by conflict) should have the largest impact on profits before the first OPEC shock in the early 1970s. Since then, conflict shocks would not allow firms to exploit production in the same way, thus reducing the available profits that could be garnered by such production manipulation. If capacity constraints are binding when a conflict occurs, then we predict that a positive stock price reaction can be expected for oil firms from such a shock. We exploit a new panel dataset to investigate the relationship between oil profitability and conflict, using conflict data from the top 20 oil producing and exporting countries in the world. We show that in the later part of our sample, 1974–2005, as cartel behavior of OPEC member countries has diminished and as conflict has become more regular and thus the information surrounding it noisier, oil stock prices do not increase in response to conflict. However, in earlier capacity constrained eras, we find that oil stocks can in fact increase in response to conflict. In some cases, the impact of conflict may cause the return of oil stocks to increase by as much as 10 percentage points.     

国际大宗商品价格至中国上下游价格的时变传导效应*

本文采用国际大宗商品价格、中国国内总产出、货币政策变量和上下游价格数据，通过构建多个TVPVARSV模型考察了1997—2017年国际大宗商品价格向中国上下游价格的时变传导效应。研究表明，由于受到来自国际生产资料和生活资料分类价格变动趋势异质性、上下游价格传导路径异质性和价格信息传导机制结构性变动的影响，国际大宗商品价格向中国上下游价格的传导效应呈现时变特征。国际大宗商品价格对国内上游价格传导稳定，但对下游价格传导长期下降，这解释了我国PPI和CPI走势的偏离现象。     

NEW MEASURES OF PRICES AND PRODUCTIVITY FOR TRADABLE AND NONTRADABLE GOODS*

Empirical work on the division of real output and prices into tradable and nontradable components has not kept pace with theoretical developments. The conventional proxies of prices and productivity by tradable and nontradable sector are examined and found deficient in several important respects. It is demonstrated that an approach that relies on the long–standing data on gross domestic product by industry of origin can overcome some of these deficiencies. These data are used to construct new annual measures of prices and productivity for tradable and nontradable output for 12 industrial countries over the period 1950–73. While far from precise, the new measures are consistent with the following criteria for distinguishing between tradables and nontradables: the degree of foreign trade participation should be higher for tradables than for nontradables; the degree of international commodity arbitrage, as measured by cross-country correlations of price changes, should be higher for tradables than nontradables; and tradables should be closer substitutes than nontradables for traded goods from other countries (imports). Despite the considerable conceptual advantages of the new measures of prices and productivity over the conventional proxies, correlation analysis indicates that the new and old measures usually move together rather closely in our 12 subject countries. The correlations are higher across the alternative relative productivity measures than for the alternative relative price measures.     

Trends in Disaggregated Import and Export Prices in Europe: Implications for the Trade and Wages Debate

We consider carefully the evidence from traded prices (as proxied by unit values) concerning the transmission of the effects of globalisation to domestic labour markets. Using standard index number techniques we decompose changes in sectoral import and export unit values into movements due to changes in pure prices of the initial bundle of goods imported or exported and changes due to upgrading of that bundle. Looking at the imports of selected European countries of textiles, clothing and footwear relative to engineering products we find evidence of strongly falling pure prices of the unskilled intensive products relative to the skilled products in the 1980s. This reinforces the view that import prices can capture the impact of globalisation in terms of falling relative prices for products produced with the intensive use of unskilled labour. However, the trends are not common across all the unskilled sectors; footwear is clearly an exception. In the absence of detailed domestic data, we look for reactions by domestic firms to increased import competition in movements in the price and composition of exports. We find evidence of stiff price competition from imports being associated with similar movements in export prices and no support for the view that import competition from low–wage countries has led to upgrading of the quality of exports.     

Remittances and Relative Prices

Using Mexican data, this article analyzes the impact of the workers' remittances on the cross‐section distribution of prices as well as on the evolution of individual relative prices over time for 272 consumer items. The results suggest that there are important differences in the responses of relative prices to remittances according to various categories of these items. While the relative prices of a number of nontradable service items such as housing consistently rise, the relative prices of several durable items such as furniture tend to fall in response to the remittance shock. Furthermore, remittances explain substantial variation in prices for a large number of consumer durables and services at various time horizons. The relative price responses are more volatile over time for most food items and less volatile for nonfood and service items reflecting different degrees of price flexibility.     

On the Impact of “Callback” Competition on International Telephony

In this paper we build a simple three-country model to evaluate the impact of callback on international telephony. The effects on both accounting rates and collection prices are studied. Callback firms exploit arbitrage opportunities in collection prices among countries, rerouting calls that originate in countries with high prices for international phone calls via countries with low prices. Contrary to what is commonly perceived, we show that callback tends to magnify the distortions associated with the current accounting rate regime. In particular, callback puts upward pressure on low price countries accounting rates and on collection charges. Callback companies are assumed to enjoy a volume price discount on each rerouted call; we show that the larger the price discount offered to callback companies, the higher the prices for international calls in the country hosting callback.     

美国需求端产业结构的变化及对中国的启示

对产业结构演化的研究都是从供给端计算的产业结构，本文构造了从需求端计算的产业结构并依此对美国需求端产业结构的演化进行了实证分析。研究表明，当年价所计算的美国需求端三次产业结构的变化小于供给端产业结构的变化；1970年以来美国第二产业的变化差异中近40%可以用外贸因素来解释。进而本文采取不变价计算了美国产业结构的变化，研究表明，自1970年以来按不变价计算的美国需求端的产业结构变化很小，且美国第三产业比例提升中有31%可以用不同产业价格因素变化来解释，44%可以用国际贸易来解释，仅有25%可以用第三产业收入弹性的变化来解释，因而收入弹性不是美国第三产业比例提升的重要原因。美国能够维持经常账户的逆差，将第三产业作为动力产业的根本原因在于美元的霸权地位。相比较而言，中国一直以来处于国际收支“双顺差”的状态，中国的具体国情和国家实力均无法满足大规模输出人民币使之成为其他国家储备货币的条件。     

Debt Concentration and Bargaining Power: Large Banks,Small Banks,and Secondary Market Prices

Commerical bank debts of developing countries are held by large international banks and smaller domestic banks. This paper investigates how debt concentration—the proportion of a country's debt held by large banks relative to small banks—affects the secondary market price for these loans. We find that countries with higher concentrations have higher secondary-market prices. We explain this empirical finding in a bargaining model that endogenizes the maximum penalty that banks can credibly impose on a recalcitrant debtor. We show that the banks' bargaining power increases with the degree of debt concentration, thus increasing repayment and secondary-market prices.     

THE MONEY DEMAND FUNCTION FOR THE EURO AREA: SOME EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

This paper sets out to re‐examine the money demand function for the euro area. Traditional specifications often yield unsatisfactory results: instability of short and long‐term coefficients; relatively large differences between estimated and actual value of variables; and significant changes in the number of long‐term relationships, etc. Using a standard Vector Error Correction Model, we find that the usual specification is indeed unstable. However, introducing a European equity price gives rise to a more stable system. Furthermore, recursive estimates confirm the relative stability of long‐term coefficients. Estimates of the real money gap, based on the money demand equation including equity prices, point to moderate, albeit persistent, excess liquidity in the euro area in recent years. The real money gap contains information about future inflation but this content may have diminished since 2001.