CYCLICAL UNEMPLOYMENT AND CYCLICAL OUTPUT: AN ESTIMATION OF OKUN'S COEFFICIENT FOR SOUTH AFRICA

Persistently high unemployment in South Africa, especially in the face of improved economic conditions since 1994, begs the question: Does unemployment in South Africa respond to changes in output? Okun's law refers to the inverse relationship that exists between cyclical output and cyclical unemployment. This paper estimates Okun's coefficient for the South African economy, using annual data from 1970‐2005. Output and unemployment are decomposed into their trend and cyclical components, using a variety of detrending methods. The presence of structural breaks in Okun's relationship is also investigated, while cointegration analysis was also considered. Evidence of a statistically significant relationship between cyclical output and cyclical unemployment are found in both symmetric (estimates range from ?0.77 to ?0.16) and asymmetric (estimates range from ?0.77 to ?0.18) specifications of Okun's law, irrespective of the detrending technique. However, cyclical unemployment constitutes only a relatively small fraction of total (observed) unemployment, which implies that a more expansionary macroeconomic policy stance might only have a limited impact on total unemployment in South Africa.     

Interaction between structural and cyclical shocks in production and employment

Interaction between Structural and Cyclical Shocks in Production and Employment. — A major aim of recent empirical modelling of the business cycle is to identify the relative importance of aggregate supply and demand shocks. This paper uses the methodology of unobserved (or structural) components time series models for the identification of technology and demand shocks in a two-equation system of structural labour productivity and industrial output. It allows us to introduce the correlation between the structural and cyclical shocks such that the mutual dependency of these shocks can be estimated explicitly. The data is quarterly time series of labour productivity in industry and industrial output for Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Our results show that the covariance of the dynamics of structural and cyclical shocks appears to be important in these countries.     

Average Tax Rate Cyclicality in OECD Countries: A Test of Three Fiscal Policy Theories

This article investigates the cyclical properties of the average effective tax rate in 26 OECD countries over 1965–2003 to test the validity of three theories of fiscal policy: (i) the standard Keynesian theory, which recommends that tax policy should be countercyclical; (ii) the Tax Smoothing hypothesis, which implies that changes in GDP should be uncorrelated with tax rates; and (iii) the positive theory of Battaglini and Coate (2008), which predicts the average tax rate should be negatively correlated with GDP. Our main finding is that the correlations of tax rates with cyclical GDP are generally quite small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. This finding is quite robust and is more consistent with the implications of the Tax Smoothing hypothesis than either the recommendations of the standard Keynesian model or predictions of the political economy theory of Battaglini and Coate.     

SOUTH AFRICA'S POST‐LIBERALISED CAPITAL FLOWS AND BUSINESS CYCLE FLUCTUATIONS

This study used Christiano and Fitzgerald filtered correlation analysis to investigate the cyclical relationships between South Africa's post‐liberalised capital flows and domestic business cycle fluctuations. The results show that foreign direct investment inflows are counter‐cyclical and proactive, while the “hot” inflows are acyclical. Thus, South Africa's post‐liberalisation “hot” inflows have not been significantly associated with domestic business cycle fluctuations. In contrast, the capital outflows are found to be consistently procyclical and proactive, suggesting that the outflows are more significantly associated with domestic business cycle fluctuations than the capital inflows. In addition, it is found that the cyclical relationships between the capital inflows and the business cycle components of exports, household consumption and gross fixed investment are generally procyclical, except for portfolio inflows, which have a counter‐cyclical relationship with fixed investment. In contrast, the capital outflows are counter‐cyclically associated with exports and household consumption, and procyclically associated with fixed investment.     

THE PROPERTIES OF CYCLES IN SOUTH AFRICAN FINANCIAL VARIABLES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE BUSINESS CYCLE

The paper describes cyclicality in a range of local and international financial variables and their relation to cyclical behaviour in the South African real economy. Cycles are derived using a dating algorithm similar to that used to determine business cycle turning points and falls within the Burns‐Mitchell tradition of business cycle analysis. Co‐movement between phases in financial variables and similar phases in the business cycle are described using the concordance statistic, instead of the correlation statistic (which requires stationarity). This is a preliminary step in identifying financial variables that can act as leading indicators of economic activity.     

ADJUSTING SOUTH AFRICA'S FISCAL BALANCE FOR TERMS-OF-TRADE EFFECTS

Standard output gap‐based calculations and interpretations of the cyclical component of the fiscal balance may convey a misleading picture in countries such as South Africa which experience substantial movements in their terms of trade. This paper therefore adjusts South Africa's general government primary balance for terms‐of‐trade effects by means of an alternative calculation of the transitory component based on a measure of the real income gap rather than the real output gap. The results indicate that measures of the cyclical component of the budget balance based on real income and real output gaps generally yield broadly similar results over history, but during exceptional periods of rapid changes in commodity prices, the measures can be very different.     

Monetary Policy and Natural Disasters in a DSGE Model

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, speculation arose that the Federal Reserve might respond by easing monetary policy. This article uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to investigate the appropriate monetary policy response to a natural disaster. We show that the standard Taylor rule response in models with and without nominal rigidities is to increase the nominal interest rate. That finding is unchanged when we consider the optimal policy response to a disaster. A nominal interest rate increase following a disaster mitigates both temporary inflation effects and output distortions that are attributable to nominal rigidities.     

Towards a Measure of Core Inflation using Singular Spectrum Analysis

This paper constructs a number of possible core measures of inflation using singular spectrum analysis (SSA). Annual changes in monthly inflation are decomposed into its trend, oscillatory and noise components in order to develop an understanding of the trend and cyclicality in South African headline inflation. Three cyclical components with differing amplitude and frequency are identified. The trend and cyclical components of inflation are found to be a good approximation of core inflation, the inertial part of inflation. These core measures are compared with other candidate core measures based on the properties of a good core inflation measure. Generally, the SSA measures outperform commonly used measures of core inflation based on both in‐ and out‐of‐sample performance.     

SOUTH AFRICA'S TRANSITION TO A CONSOLIDATED BUDGET

The size of South Africa's fiscal stimuli, whether intended or not, has helped to avert negative consequences of the global financial downturn. With the economic cycle turning again, consolidation of deficits and a reduction of the level of debt are again the focus of policymakers. These outcomes are generally achieved by either increasing tax rates or cutting spending (discretionary fiscal policy), whereas an alternative option is to allow automatic stabilisers to consolidate budgets. This study attempts to answer whether cyclical factors or discretionary policy minimise output volatility and which one of the two presents a better policy option regarding uncertainty in real economic recovery. For this purpose, a small open‐economy gap model is built using South African data, where the budget deficit is endogenised by way of a fiscal policy “rule.” Sensitivity analyses and robustness checks are carried out using a structural vector autoregression. Given the estimates of both the automatic stabilisers as well as the components of discretionary fiscal policy, we are able to obtain impact multipliers on output and conduct scenario testing for optimal fiscal policy response towards fiscal consolidation as well as debt sustainability.     

Understanding the Cyclical Nature of Financial Intermediation Costs

Intermediation costs (i.e., all noninterest bank expenses) are counter‐cyclical and their changes have significant effects at the country‐level; however, the literature is silent on what drives their cyclicality. Previous studies have examined costs using cross‐sectional or low frequency data and thus cannot capture dynamic macroeconomic effects across time. We fill this gap by examining U.S. intermediation costs using a quarterly, bank‐level dataset from 1993 through 2012. This data set allows for the separation of microeconomic and macroeconomic factors affecting the cyclicality of costs. The analysis shows that house prices are the main driving source of this counter‐cyclicality. Because housing is used as collateral, a price decline leads banks to increase their operating costs for monitoring, screening and litigation costs which cause a credit crunch in the economy.     

Economic Globalization and Inflation in China: A Multivariate Approach

This paper evaluates whether globalization has increased the role of global factors in driving inflation in China. Unlike other published studies on the relationship between globalization and inflation, which mostly use Phillips curve models, this paper uses multivariate dynamic models to examine the dynamic interactions between globalization and inflation in China. Empirical results with quarterly data spanning from 1995 to 2012 show that the global output gap significantly affects the dynamics of inflation in China. In particular, the global output gap is superior to the domestic output gap in predicting domestic inflation. Impulse response and variance decomposition analyses reinforce this finding. Our results indicate that the central bank of China should take developments in global output into account in its monetary policy‐making process.     

ON THE CYCLICALITY OF SOUTH AFRICAN FISCAL POLICY

This paper examines the cyclicality of government revenue, spending and the key fiscal balances in South Africa during 1972‐2001. The results suggest that while government revenues were largely acyclical, government spending appears to have been predominantly counter‐cyclical, in line with the recommendations of neoclassical analysis. In addition, countercyclical government spending appears to have translated into a countercyclical policy stance overall. This finding contrasts markedly with the results from other empirical studies of South Africa and other emerging market and developing economies, which typically indicate procyclical fiscal policy.     

China's Trade Slowdown: Cyclical or Structural?

This paper analyzes whether the slowdown of China's trade in 2012–2015 was cyclical or structural, and further discusses the effects of structural factors, including trade structure, trade protectionism and global value chain participation. Using the national panel data from 2000 to 2015, based on the error correction model and import‐intensity‐adjusted demand model, our results show that the slowdown of China's trade growth in 2012–2015 was mainly a result of cyclical factors. Using 2000–2015 industry‐level data, we also find that the structure of trade goods had an inhibitory effect on the import slowdown but a positive effect on the export slowdown. Trade protectionism had an adverse effect on the trade growth slowdown. The global value chain participation marginally contributed to the slowdown in trade growth. Therefore, the impacts of structural factors on trade growth slowdown cannot be ignored, and related policies should receive greater attention from policy‐makers.     

Equilibrium selection under cyclical disequilibrium dynamics

The paper considers an abstract economy exhibiting strategiccomplementarity and multiple, isolated Nash equilibria. It introducesexplicit disequilibrium adjustments, which are based on a combinationof adaptive and extrapolative forecasts. In this way the locallystable equilibria are typically approached in a cyclical manner.Globally, the phenomenon of overshooting increases the likelinessof regime shifting in response to exogenous shocks. In particular,even undampened cyclical behaviour is possible after a one-timeshock. A general conclusion is that the strong propagation effectsmake the economy much more susceptible to path-dependence thanit would be under the equilibrium selection hypothesis conventionallyemployed in this framework.     

The common trend and common cycle of exports and the real exchange rate: Empirical results from Swiss data

Conclusion This paper contains an empirical analysis of the relationship of Swiss goods exports, the real exchange rate and world trade, using the common-trend-common-cycle methodology. This exercise shows that the trend and cyclical dependence of these variables are strongly different: exports and the real exchange rate exhibit a positive long-run or trend dependence of world trade whereas the short-run or cyclical relationship of exports to the real exchange rate is strongly negative with approximately a unit elasticity. These results, which differ strongly from standard dynamic regression or error correction estimates, can be interpreted as follows. In the short run we observe the strong negative cyclical relationship between exports and the real exchange rate, which we expect from short-run macroeconomic models with sticky prices. If we make the reasonable assumption that short-run real exchange rate movements are exogenous to exports and, for instance, caused by monetary policy then we come to the conclusion that cyclical real exchange rate variations lead to strong export cycles. However, in the long run, there is a completely different positive comovement of these two variables, which are both driven by the world trade trend. This common trend of exports and the real exchange rate can be understood as an equilibrium reaction of both variables, price and quantity of the exported goods, to exogenous changes in world trade given a production technology available for the country.     

VICIOUS AND VIRTUOUS CIRCLES – THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNEMPLOYMENT

We develop an empirical non-linear model of equilibrium unemployment and test its policy implications for a number of OECD countries. The model here sees the natural rate and the associated equilibrium path of unemployment as endogenous, pushed by the interaction of shocks and the institutional structure of the economy; the channel through which these two forces feed on each other is a political economy process whereby voters with "limited information" on the natural rate of unemployment react to shocks by demanding more or less social protection. The reduced form results from a dozen OECD economies give support to the model prediction of a pattern of unemployment behaviour in which unemployment moves between high and low equilibria in response to shocks and the model specification is superior in forecasting performance out of sample to alternative models of "generalised hysteresis".     

SPATIAL BAYESIAN METHODS OF FORECASTING HOUSE PRICES IN SIX METROPOLITAN AREAS OF SOUTH AFRICA

This paper estimates Spatial Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (SBVAR) models, based on the First-Order Spatial Contiguity and the Random Walk Averaging priors, for six metropolitan areas of South Africa, using monthly data over the period of 1993:07 to 2005:06. We then forecast one- to six-months-ahead house prices over the forecast horizon of 2005:07 to 2007:06. When we compare forecasts generated from the SBVARs with those from an unrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR) and the Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (BVAR) models based on the Minnesota prior, we find that the spatial models tend to outperform the other models for large middle-segment houses; while the VAR and the BVAR models tend to produce lower average out-of-sample forecast errors for middle and small-middle segment houses, respectively. In addition, based on the priors used to estimate the Bayesian models, our results also suggest that prices tend to converge for both large- and middle-sized houses, but no such evidence could be obtained for the small-sized houses.     

Race and the discouraged female worker: A question of labor force attachment

This article presents an empirical examination of female attachment to the labor market. An econometric model of the discouragement process is built to determine how strongly women exhibit the inclination to remain labor force participants over the course of the business cycle. The estimated results imply that women, as a group, have a stronger response to changes in short-run cyclical fluctuations and therefore will sever their attachment to the labor force significantly sooner than their male counterparts. However, when the analysis is broken down by race, minority females are discovered to demonstrate only a modest response to short-run fluctuations and a very pronounced long-run sensitivity to cyclical swings. Thus, the results suggest that while females as a whole do not exhibit the same degree of labor force attachment as males, minority females respond in a manner similar to that of male workers. Such a conclusion is in agreement with the growing literature on the labor market behavior of minority females who are increasingly playing the same economic role in society as men.     

Multiple Structural Breaks and Inflation Persistence: Evidence from China

The degree of inflation persistence fluctuates more in developing countries than in industrialized countries. This is because there are more economic reforms in developing countries than in industrialized countries. Hence, it is important to study the inflation persistence in developing countries. The present paper investigates the pattern of inflation persistence in China, a developing and transitional economy. Specifically, the paper studies statistically the number of structural breaks in China's inflation persistence based on the monthly retail price index (MRPI) and the quarterly retail price index (QRPI) inflation series from 1983 to 2011. The findings show that there are five and three structural breaks in the MRPI and QRPI inflation persistence, respectively. The present paper also exposes a high degree of persistence over the whole sample period and a slight decline in the level of the persistence since 1994. Furthermore, the persistence of two inflation series does not change monotonously but with obvious cyclical patterns. Using these derived estimated structural breakpoints, likely causes of the breakpoints in inflation persistence are investigated. Finally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Consumption,Credit, and Macroeconomic Policies: Theory and Evidence from the United States

Abstract

The paper examines determinants of private consumption in the USA. The empirical model includes disposable income, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index, the interest rate, and the real effective exchange rate. Anticipated movements in these determinants are likely to affect planned consumption, while unanticipated changes determine cyclical consumption. Fluctuations in private consumption are mostly cyclical with respect to changes in disposable income and the consumers’ sentiment index. In contrast, an increase in the interest rate decreases both planned and cyclical consumption. Fiscal policy has a direct negative effect on cyclical consumption, which is not dependent on the interest rate. Monetary growth, in contrast, increases liquidity to finance both planned and cyclical private consumption.