A Comparison of Menu Costs in Open and Closed Economies with a Mixed Industrial Structure

In this paper we develop Dixon and Hansen (1997) to allow for two-sector small open economy in which the non-traded sector is monopolistic. The closed economy version of the model generalises Dixon/Hansen to allow for diminishing returns on the traded sector. We compare the short-run impact of menu costs on the economy and also the size of menu costs needed to sustain nominal rigidity in both the open and closed economies. We find that whilst the welfare gains from monetary expansion are of a similar magnitude, nominal rigidity can occur for much smaller menu costs than in the closed economy case. Hence we argue that menu costs and the resultant nominal rigidities are more likely to be important in an open economy.     

Municipal bonds as alternatives to PPPs: Facilitating direct municipal access to private capital

The advantages of using municipal bonds to finance urban infrastructure are becoming increasingly evident to policy makers in emerging economies, many of whom are making efforts to accelerate the development of municipal bond markets in their countries. Municipal bonds are sometimes viewed as a less expensive way of financing infrastructure than by public‐private partnerships (PPPs), or methods that maintain greater public control over projects and service provision. The objective of this article is to place current efforts by the South African government to promote municipal bond market development in an international context. This is done by briefly reviewing the advantages local governments experience by issuing municipal bonds to finance infrastructure; discussing some experiences of other countries in trying to accelerate the development of municipal bond markets; and reviewing the need and prospects for an active municipal debt market in South Africa. The article also examines the extent to which municipal bonds should be thought of as alternatives to PPPs in an emerging economy context.     

谈合同当事人的重大误解

关于我国应实行什么样的货币和财政政策 ,社会上观点很多。本文从封闭经济和开放经济两个角度对此进行了分析 ,并结合我国经济的实际情况提出了实施积极的财政和适当放松的货币政策的建议。     

R&D Subsidies and Foreign Direct Investment

We devise a model in which domestic firms do applied R&D, which can be subsidized by the government, and foreign firms with superior technology can enter in the domestic market. Foreign Direct Investment can act as a substitute of subsidies to improve domestic R&D, the share of domestic leading firms and consumption. Relatively closed economies may benefit from R&D subsidization while relatively open economies may not. For relatively low growth of the technological frontier, it is optimal to subsidize R&D and close the economy to foreign investment but the opposite happens for relatively high growth. Numerical simulations show the economy dynamics after policy experiments.     

公共基础设施与城市聚集经济研究——基于上海市的数据分析

国内城市研究中，缺乏包含公共设施和聚集经济的综合研究文献。文章选取上海市1985—2008年工业企业的统计数据，利用生产函数方法对上海市聚集经济进行了研究和分析。结果表明：城市公共基础设施投入水平对城市聚集经济和生产率增长有着正效应。     

Openness and growth in East Asia after the Asian crisis

Openness with respect to trade in goods, services and foreign direct investment has a positive marginal effect on growth. The fast-growing East Asian economies were early openers, and this contributed to their fast growth. However, East Asian countries are not relatively open today. This factor, together with the convergence effect of fast growth in the past, imply that their economies will slow down. Their growth prospects are further reduced by growing geographic discrimination against their goods and services in world markets, and the slow down of the Japanese economy.     

冰岛危机、货币脆弱性与东亚货币合作

2008年下半年开始,冰岛的经济形势急转直下,甚至濒临"国家破产"。冰岛的货币体制是导致冰岛危机的重要原因。冰岛克朗是全世界可自由兑换、汇率自由浮动的流通量最小的货币。当金融危机出现的时候,冰岛克朗会受到最大的冲击,货币不稳定又会进一步放大金融危机的作用。这说明小国开放经济体的货币存在国际脆弱性。东亚各经济体货币同样面临国际脆弱性问题,其根源是东亚发展模式的脆弱性。为了防范货币国际脆弱性引起经济危机,东亚应该加强区域金融合作,其现实路径是建立各经济体汇率的分层次协调机制。     

Remittances,Monetary Policy,and Partial Sterilization

Remittances play a large and important role in certain economies, where they became a significant share of GDP. Official government records of these flows have been systematically improved since governments realized their importance, but a significant percentage of remittances remain unrecorded. This, together with the shadow economy, may pose a problem for monetary policy. This article uses a limited participation model to examine the differential effect that higher shares of remittances can have on monetary policy and describes the impact of remittances on a small open economy under partial sterilization. It demonstrates how a typical monetary shock will lead to a more pronounced liquidity effect when remittances become a higher proportion of GDP. It also shows that a positive remittance shock improves consumption and lowers interest rates, but as it also reduces work effort it momentarily lowers output. Such dynamics are exacerbated as the degree of partial sterilization is accentuated.     

Measuring the Real and Financial Connectedness of Selected African Economies with the Global Economy

We examine the real and financial connectedness of selected African economies with the global economy using a network approach. We find that the connectedness of African economies with the global economy is quite sizable, with the global financial crisis increasing the connectedness measures above their pre‐crisis levels. The results show that U.S., EU and Canada dominate Africa's equity markets, while China, India and Japan dominate Africa's real activities. Our results suggest that African economies are predominantly small open economies, deeply interconnected but systemically unimportant and vulnerable to headwinds emanating from the dominant economies in the overall global economy.     

Economic Systems and Economic Growth

In a planned economy, state monopoly ensures that economies of scale are exploited. However, state monopoly could not commit to reward its workers. Anticipating this, individuals will exert less effort. In a market economy, competition among firms ensures that higher effort from workers will be rewarded. However, competition means that economies of scale are not fully exploited. Per capita output growth is generated by continuous adoption of new technologies substituting labor for capital. Growth rate in a market economy is higher than that in a planned economy when the incentive to exert effort is relatively more important.     

虚拟经济与中国工业化腾飞

现代市场经济的最突出表现是虚拟经济的增长。如果只是研究实体经济增长,而不研究虚拟经济增长,那么,这种研究就未能做到与社会经济发展同步。虚拟经济具有虚拟性,但虚拟经济同样是一种真实的存在,只不过虚拟经济的真实存在不同于实体经济的真实存在。虚拟经济的这种真实存在集中表现在它与实体经济使用的是同样的货币。正是这同样的货币将实体经济与虚拟经济连接在一起。目前,中国经济的发展已进入工业化腾飞阶段,由于市场机制的作用,出现了激烈的价格上涨,但这并不是通货膨胀,而是必要的和需要理性承受的价格调整,只是这种价格上涨也必然引起货币的急剧贬值。而这种货币贬值既会影响实体经济领域,也会影响虚拟经济领域。就中国的股票市场而言,在人民币不断贬值的前提下,股票的市值需要相应地爬升,而不是跌落,否则,就是市场尚不成熟或出现了较为严重的问题。     

Estimated Open Economy New Keynesian Phillips Curves for the G7

In this paper we develop an open economy model of firms’ pricing behaviour under imperfect competition. This allows us to introduce various terms of trade effects influencing the firm’s pricing decision, in addition to labour costs which dominate most closed-economy specifications of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC). Our analysis gives rise to a hybrid open economy NKPC which nests existing closed and open economy specifications adopted in empirical work. We estimate this specification for the G7 economies and find that the US, UK and Canada typically enjoy less inertia in price setting than the European G7 economies and Japan and that these estimates are both plausible and in line with survey evidence. We also find that the proportion of firms which use simple backward-looking rules of thumb in price setting is greater when the frequency of price change is smaller. Finally there is evidence of significant asymmetries in price setting amongst EMU members.

The Impact of a Business School on Regional Economic Development: a Case Study

This paper investigates the impact of a major extension to Lancaster University's Management School on the North West regional economy. It differs from earlier university impact studies since the estimated impact is not confined to backward linkage effects but focuses specifically on the forward linkage effects that will occur as a result of greater engagement with firms in the region's SME sector. The paper demonstrates that the expansion of the university sector can have far greater beneficial effects on their regional economies than is indicated by conventional impact studies. Specifically, the provision of business advice to SMEs can be a significant factor in increasing their sales volume.     

Human capital,trade, and economic growth

Human Capital, Trade, and Economic Growth. — Human capital, because of its special role in innovative activity and technological progress, has formed the bedrock of the new theories of endogenous growth. However, it not only serves as an engine of growth but also as a productive input along with labor and physical capital. In this study, the authors find evidence of the importance of both roles of human capital. They also find that the relationship between growth and the external effects of human capital vary according to trade regime. When literacy rates are relatively high, open economies grow about 0.65 to 1.75 percentage points more than closed economies.     

Liberalization,export incentives,and trade intensity: new evidence from Nepalese manufacturing industries

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the consequences of liberalization and export incentives on trade intensity in Nepal, a “least developed” country with weak institutions and severe infrastructure bottlenecks. Industry level evidence provides no support for any link between protection and export performance, or that export intensity is determined primarily by relative factor abundance. Results suggest that lower protection and public sector dominance lead to higher import penetration, and that foreign investment increases import penetration when the policy regime is restrictive. Although some of these phenomena are due to specifically Nepalese factors, such as its open border with India, some general policy lessons for other least developed economies emerge.     

Deficit versus balanced budget financing of ICT Infrastructure and Export Quality

This paper examines whether and how provision of better quality of ICT infrastructure by the government incentivizes quality upgrading of exports of IT-enabled services of a small dependent economy that displays a diversified export basket. The central idea of the analysis is that infrastructure development has both benefits and costs, and thus may not necessarily improve quality of service exports.Method of financing the ICT infrastructure is also important. We show that if the skill-productivity augmenting effect of better quality of ICT dominates its adverse wage-cost effect, then the quality of the export of ITeS will be upgraded if the government switches from deficit financing to balanced budget financing (through an input tariff) of its expenditure on ICT development. An exogenous increase in expenditure on ICT development raises the quality of service exports regardless of how it is financed, though raises it by a larger magnitude when financed through an increase in the input tariff. Thus, when the primary objective is to incentivize upgrading of quality of exports, balanced budget financing of infrastructure development seems to be the more preferred policy.     

Rationing in open economy and dynamic macroeconomics: A survey

Summary A survey of rationing in micro theories of macroeconomics is presented. The survey starts with a closed economy with money and inventories, which consists of a representative household, a firm and government. After a discussion of the notional demands and supplies and the properties of the Walrasian equilibrium, a discussion of the effective demands and supplies leads to an analysis of the four regimes (Keynesian unemployment, classical unemployment, repressed inflation and underconsumption). A fiscal and monetary contraction decreases sales and employment when there is Keynesian unemployment, but is expansionary (neutral) when there is repressed inflation (classical unemployment). The survey continues with an analysis of the effects of rationing in a small open economy. It considers the one-sector model and a model with a traded and a nontraded sector. The latter model is used to discuss the effects of an oil discovery on the Gulf countries and on Latin American countries. The survey ends with a discussion of rationing in dynamic economies, which leads to an analysis of the effects of expectations about future constraints on current regimes and to a discussion of boot-strap equilibria.The author is Director of the Network for Quantitative Economics. This paper is a brief and eclectic survey of rationing models of closed one-period and two-period economies and of small open economies. It contains no significant new material. The author is grateful to Professor Theo van de Klundert for his constructive comments on an earlier version of this survey.     

The social value of income information in a model with market power and endogenous variety

The present paper analyzes the value of public information in a general equilibrium economy with imperfect competition. The welfare effects of an improved information system for perfectly competitive economies have been extensively investigated in the published literature. Schlee (2001) shows that the value of information is always negative in exchange economies if an efficient risk sharing mechanism exists. In contrast, in economies with production, better information reduces welfare provided consumers are sufficiently risk-averse ( Eckwert and Zilcha 2000, 2003 ). In the present paper it will be shown that this result is robust if the production sector exhibits monopolistic competition in the Chamberlinian sense. Even so, the inefficiency of equilibria adds further potential for positive welfare effects of improved information. A model is presented where the degree of market imperfection is positively linked to the value of information. If the markup on competitive prices is sufficiently high, the value of information is positive; that is, better information increases economic welfare.     

美国经济波动对东亚经济的影响

经济全球化使世界经济紧密联系在一起,各国经济也更易受到外部经济冲击的影响。本文考察了美国经济波动对东亚8个开放经济体的影响,结果显示,东亚经济大约有18%的波动来源于美国经济的冲击,这主要是因为美国和东亚保持着紧密的贸易和金融联系。由于各经济体在经济总量、汇率制度安排等方面的差异,造成受美国经济波动的影响也不相同。总体看,这些冲击持续的时间大约在15个季度。     

弱势回稳的世界经济:新变量、新动力、新机遇——2020年世界经济分析报告

受贸易摩擦、地缘政治和衰退风险等重大不确定因素的共同影响,2019年的世界经济面临着不断下行的压力。发达国家和新兴经济体的经济增速出现了同步放缓。展望2020年,随着中美贸易摩擦和英国"脱欧"紧张局势缓解以及各国继续运用货币与财政手段进行"政策托底",世界经济有望弱势回稳。其中,发达经济体的增长势头趋缓。美国将迎来大选,政府有动力刺激经济实现温和的增长;欧洲的增长会更为缓慢,部分南欧国家爆发债务危机的可能性仍然存在;日本的经济增长可能会因为消费税上调而出现负面影响。新兴经济体的增长动能有望增强,但部分国家面临着债务、汇率及民粹主义风险,各国经济走势也将出现分化。随着中国改革开放力度的增强,中国经济将持续成为全球经济发展的核心推力与稳定器。