Measuring and Explaining the Impact of Productive Efficiency on Economic Development

A limitation of most empirical cross-country studies that focuson determinants of GDP or GDP growth is that they fail to distinguishexplicitly between inputs used in production and conditionsthat facilitate production. For example, physical capital, humancapital, and labor are production inputs, whereas the qualityof institutions, macroeconomic stability, and market qualityare conditions that facilitate production. This article takesthis distinction seriously and uses a stochastic frontier approachto study factors affecting economic performance. A panel dataset of 71 countries for the 1980–98 period is used toestimate a production frontier with physical capital, humancapital, and labor as inputs. The article also analyzes whatdrives productive efficiency, using the institutional framework,macroeconomic stability, market quality, and urbanization aspossible explanatory factors. Urbanization turns out to be animportant determinant, with the rule of law, inflation rate,and market quality also affecting productive efficiency.     

Modeling the macroeconomic effects of AIDS, with an application to Tanzania.

The 1956 Solow growth model is expanded to study the effects of the AIDS epidemic on the growth path of the economy and per capita GDP (gross domestic product). AIDS and no-AIDS scenarios are compared analytically and via simulations based upon Tanzanian demographic and macroeconomic data. The 1st section discusses various channels through which AIDS might affect the macroeconomy and describes its expected demographic impact in Tanzania. The model incorporating these key channels is then developed in the 2nd section. It is employed specifically to discuss the likely effect on the ratio of capital to labor and on output per capita as the economy moves from a no-AIDS situation toward a new steady state in which AIDS is assumed to be endemic. A simple simulation model in the 3rd section forecasts the time paths of macro aggregates in Tanzania as the prevalence of AIDS increases. These time paths are then compared with simulated results for a no-AIDS situation to determine the severity of the impact of the disease on the growth path of the Tanzanian economy, Bulatao's 1990 demographic scenarios are input in the simulated version of the model. The 4th section concludes by considering the policy implications of the analysis. The analysis indicates that without decisive policy action AIDS may reduce the GDP of Tanzania in the year 2010 by 15-25% over what it would be if AIDS did not exist. Per capita income levels are expected to fall by 0-10% by the year 2010.     

中国季度GDP的即时预测与混频分析

及时、准确地获得GDP短期预测值对于宏观调控和企业决策至关重要。本文在收集我国实时碎尾数据集的基础上,采用混频动态因子模型,将我国季度GDP的预测频率由“季度”提高到“日度”。研究结果表明,相对于混频抽样模型以及MFVAR等现有模型,混频动态因子模型能够有效解决实时预测中需要面临的数据问题,包括混频指标、碎尾特征、数据的周期性缺失等。本文模型在每个数据发布日,均可更新GDP的预测结果,这不仅将最新的经济活动信息迅速地体现到GDP预测中,而且显著提高了GDP即时预测的准确性,且预测结果随着月度数据信息的增加趋近于GDP真实值。此外,本文还估算了拟GDP季度同比增长率和GDP月度同比增长率两个月度数据序列,为我国宏观经济监测与政策分析提供一定的数据支撑。     

国际资本异常流动对经济增长具有非线性效应吗?--基于汇率制度和金融市场发展视角

本文基于64个经济体1999-2017年的季度面板数据,采用工具变量广义矩估计(IV-GMM)方法,从汇率制度和金融市场发展视角研究国际资本异常流动对经济增长的非线性效应。研究表明,资本流动激增显著促进了经济增长,资本流动中断、外逃和撤回对经济增长具有负向影响。有弹性的汇率制度显著减弱了四种资本异常流动情形对经济增长的冲击效应;金融市场发展显著降低了激增、中断和撤回对经济增长的冲击影响,强化了外逃对经济增长的冲击效应。随着汇率制度弹性和金融发展程度变化,新兴经济体与发达经济体资本外逃对经济增长的影响呈现明显的异质性。本文结论对于各国防范国际资本异常流动风险、维护国内经济金融稳定,以及稳步有序推进汇率市场化改革和金融市场建设具有重要的参考价值。     

Granularity in banking and growth: Does financial openness matter?

We explore the impact of large banks and of financial openness for aggregate growth. Large banks matter because of granular effects: if markets are very concentrated in terms of the size distribution of banks, idiosyncratic shocks at the bank-level do not cancel out in the aggregate but can affect macroeconomic outcomes. Financial openness may affect GDP growth in and of itself, and it may also influence concentration in banking and thus the impact of bank-specific shocks for the aggregate economy. To test these relationships, we use different measures of de jure and de facto financial openness in a panel dataset for 79 countries and the years 1996–2009. Our research has three main findings: First, bank-level shocks significantly impact upon GDP. Second, financial openness tends to lower GDP growth. Third, granular effects tend to be stronger in financially closed economies.     

Capital taxation,investment, growth,and welfare

This paper formulates a model of economic growth to study the effects of broad capital taxation (of profits, dividends, and capital gains) on macroeconomic outcomes in small open economies. A framework of exogenous growth permits modeling countries in transition to a country-specific steady state and to discern steady-state and transitory effects of shocks on economic outcomes. The chosen framework is amenable to structural estimation and, in view of the parsimony of the model, fits data on 79 countries over the period 1996–2011 well. The counterfactual analysis based on the estimated model suggests that capital-tax reductions induce positive effects on output and the capital stock (per unit of effective labor) that are economically significant and are accommodated within time windows of 5 years without much further economic response after that. The responses of economic aggregates are found to be relatively strongest to changes in corporate-profit-tax rates and weaker for dividend and capital-gains taxes.     

Government size and economic growth in emerging market economies: a panel co-integration approach

A significant positive influence of both government size and domestic investment on economic growth is found in the long run during 1970–2006 for a sample of 19 emerging market economies, employing panel co-integration testing and estimating the parameters using dynamic ordinary least square method, for all the indicators, excepting the case when one chooses general government final consumption expenditure as a percentage of GDP a measure of government size and gross capital formation as a percentage of GDP a measure of domestic investment, with per capita GDP a proxy for economic growth. The findings corroborate the argument that diverse results of the earlier studies are due to different measures adopted.     

中国自然利率之谜与债券市场定价——基于宏观金融模型视角

关于发达国家的研究普遍存在使用标准金融模型估计的自然利率与宏观方法估计的自然利率不相符的“自然利率之谜”现象。本文分别使用金融模型和宏观半结构模型估计中国的自然利率,发现同样存在“自然利率之谜”现象。我们通过构建一致性的宏观金融模型,采用宏观经济变量和收益率曲线信息共同估计自然利率来解决这一问题。此外,寻找债券收益率的影响因子是债券定价研究的重要方面,宏观与金融模型的结合是债券定价研究的重要趋势。宏观金融理论表明,趋势通货膨胀和自然利率是收益率曲线的基本决定因素,在宏观金融框架下,我们进一步研究了自然利率对债券收益率的影响。研究结果表明:(1)宏观金融模型能很好地解决中国“自然利率之谜”问题,宏观金融模型估计得到的自然利率略低于宏观半结构模型的结果。(2)自然利率对债券收益率有显著影响,模型中增加自然利率信息能够提高对不同期限国债收益率的拟合优度。本文对进一步加强自然利率影响因素研究,运用一致性宏观金融模型得到的自然利率信息优化货币政策效果提供了参考。     

Agriculture and aggregate productivity: A quantitative cross-country analysis

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data reveals that a high share of employment and low labor productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for low aggregate productivity in poor countries. Using a two-sector general-equilibrium model, we show that differences in economy-wide productivity, barriers to modern intermediate inputs in agriculture, and barriers in the labor market generate large cross-country differences in the share of employment and labor productivity in agriculture. The model implies a factor difference of 10.8 in aggregate labor productivity between the richest and the poorest 5% of the countries in the world, leaving the unexplained factor at 3.2. Overall, this two-sector framework performs much better than a single-sector growth model in explaining observed differences in international productivity.     

The Impact of Economic Shocks in the Rest of the World on South Africa: Evidence from a Global VAR

The substantial change in South Africa’s trade patterns over the past two decades has affected the impact of economic shocks in major world economies on South Africa. To investigate the effect, we use a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model with time-varying trade weights to account for changing international trade linkages. We show that the long-term impact of a shock to Chinese GDP on South African GDP is much stronger in 2009 than in 1995, due to the substantial increase in South Africa’s trade with China since the mid-1990s. At the same time, the importance of the U.S. economy to South Africa diminished considerably. The results indicate one of the possible reasons why the recent global crisis did not affect South Africa as much as it affected developed economies. It also stresses the increased risk, to the South African and other economies, should China experience slower GDP growth.     

The effects of systemic banking crises in the inter-war period

This paper examines the time-profile of the impact of systemic banking crises on GDP and industrial production using a panel of 24 countries over the inter-war period and compares this to the post-war experience of these countries. We show that banking crises have effects that induce medium-term adjustments on economies. Focussing on an eight-year horizon, it is clear that the negative effects of systemic banking crises last over the entirety of this time-horizon. The effect has been identified for GDP and industrial production. The adverse effect on the industrial sector stands out as being substantially larger in magnitude relative to the macroeconomic effect. Comparing the results across long-run historical periods for the same selection of countries and variables identifies some differences that stand out: the short term macroeconomic impact effects are much larger in the post-war period, suggesting that the propagation channels of shocks operate at a faster pace in the more recent period. Moreover, the time-profile of effects differs, suggesting that modern policies may be modulating the temporal shape of the response to banking crises shocks. However, the broad magnitude of the adverse effect of banking crises remains comparable across these time periods.     

Effects of Monetary and Macroprudential Policies—Evidence from Four Inflation Targeting Economies

We examine the effects of monetary and macroprudential policies in the Asia‐Pacific region, where many inflation targeting economies have adopted macroprudential policies in order to safeguard financial stability. Using structural panel vector autoregressions that identify both monetary and macroprudential policy actions, we show that tighter macroprudential policies used to contain credit growth also have a significant negative impact on macroeconomic aggregates such as real GDP and the price level. The similar effects of monetary and macroprudential policies may suggest a complementary use of the two policies at normal times. However, they could also create challenges for policymakers, especially during times when low inflation coincides with buoyant credit growth.     

Future labor income growth and the cross-section of equity returns

This paper examines the equilibrium relation between future labor income growth and expected asset returns; it proposes revisions in the expectation of future labor income growth as a macroeconomic state variable and suggests a three-factor model, including a factor related to this variable, along with the consumption growth factor and the market factor. The proposed future labor income growth factor is positively associated with the Fama-French factors and subsumes their explanatory power in explaining the cross-section of stock returns. These results provide a possible economic explanation for the roles of the Fama-French factors: they are compensation for higher exposure to the risk related to changes in the value of human capital. This paper also compares the performance of the proposed three-factor model with other competing models and finds that the proposed model specification better captures cross-sectional variation in average returns than any of the competing asset pricing models considered.     

Financial integration,globalization, and real activity

Using data for 48 advanced and emerging market economies during 1985–2008, this paper examines the impact of measures of financial integration and globalization on several dimensions of real activity. We find that both advances in financial integration and globalization are associated with higher growth, lower growth volatility, and lower probabilities of severe declines in real activity, with the positive impact of financial integration on macroeconomic stability enhanced by improvements in corporate governance. Thus, we find no evidence of a trade-off between advances in financial integration, globalization, and growth and macroeconomic stability.     

宏观经济因素与经常项目失衡的调整:跨国经验及其对中国的启示

本文利用1980年至2005年全球范围内106个国家或地区的相关经济数据,确定了经常项目失衡调整的事后标准,进而识别出经常项目失衡的不同调整期间。借助于调整期间的界定,本文针对宏观经济因素与经常项目失衡的调整问题进行了实证研究。基于跨国数据的实证研究结果表明了一些宏观经济变量对经常项目失衡的调整具有显著的影响作用,例如固定资本形成、贸易条件变化以及官方储备等。本文合理借鉴了经常项目失衡调整的跨国经验,并且结合中国经济实际情况针对中国经常项目的盈余调整给出了相关政策建议。     

开放经济下的“双支柱”调控稳定效应研究

本文研究了管理浮动汇率制下我国货币政策和宏观审慎政策双支柱的调控稳定效应。首先,本文从实证层面考察了人民币汇率升贬值对央行货币政策的非对称影响。接着,本文构建了包含银行部门与货币错配的开放宏观经济模型,重点分析了在面对美联储加息、人民币贬值压力的情况下,货币政策(包括对汇率的反应)和宏观审慎政策(对外债的逆周期调节)的配合如何影响宏观经济和金融的稳定。结论表明,如果缺少宏观审慎政策的配合,货币政策对汇率的反应将导致产出、通货膨胀和资产价格等经济金融变量的波动增大。在存在宏观审慎政策的前提下,相对于完全浮动汇率制,管理浮动汇率制从中长期看能进一步促进产出和外债等核心变量的稳定。     

基于时间序列模型的中国GDP增长预测分析

作为度量一个国家或地区所有常住单位在一定时期之内所生产和所提供的最终产品或服务的重要总量指标,如果能够对GDP做出正确的预测,必然可以有效引导宏观经济健康发展,为高层管理部门提供决策依据。选用适合短期预测的ARIMA模型对中国1952～2010年的GDP进行计量建模分析,预测结果认为未来五年中国的经济增长仍将处于一个水平较高的上升通道。     

Changing Labor Market Conditions and Economic Development in Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, China

In the newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Hong Kong,the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China), the entireworking population has benefited from labor market institutions.The East Asian NIEs attained and maintained generally full employment,improved their job mixes, raised real earnings, and loweredtheir rates of poverty. This article reaches two principal conclusions. First, labormarket conditions continued to improve in all four economiesin the 1980s at rates remarkably similar to their rates of aggregateeconomic growth. Second, labor market repression was not a majorfactor in the growth experiences of these economies in the 1980s.It thus appears that labor market repression is neither necessarynor desirable for outward-oriented economic development.     

Existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in nonoptimal unbounded infinite horizon economies

In applied work in macroeconomics and finance, nonoptimal infinite horizon economies are often studied in which the state-space is unbounded. Important examples of such economies are single-sector growth models with production externalities, valued fiat money, monopolistic competition, and/or distortionary government taxation. Although sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of Markovian equilibrium are well known for the compact state space case, no similar sufficient conditions exist for unbounded growth. This paper provides such a set of sufficient conditions, and presents a computational algorithm that will prove asymptotically consistent when computing Markovian equilibrium.