Is the Current Account Deficit Sustainable?

This article argues that Australia's savings behaviour relative to its investment opportunities ensures a structural current account deficit which is fundamentally sustainable. In fact considerable scope seems to exist for it to widen further, irrespective of fiscal tightening that has occurred during the last few years, without alarming macroeconomic consequences.     

美国贸易逆差:增长惯性与可持续性

美国的经常项目逆差特别是贸易逆差“历史悠久”,尤其是近年来高速增长,已引起人们广泛的关注。本文作者认为:20世纪90年代以来的美国贸易逆差已很难单从汇率、贸易政策及产品竞争力等单个变量来加以解释。通过运用滞后一年的时间数列相关分析及回归分析,本文得出的结论是:当期美国贸易逆差是前期美国贸易逆差的惯性增长,并且只要美国资本与金融账户的盈余足够冲抵贸易逆差,美国的贸易逆差便具有可持续性。针对近期美国人制造的“人民币升值论”,结合近十年来中美双边贸易现实,说明美国贸易逆差与人民币汇率之间没有必然联系,人民币升值也不可能改善美国的贸易收支状况。     

Fundamentals at Odds? The US Current Account Deficit and Dollar

In mid‐2008, the real effective exchange rate (REER) of the dollar was close to its minimum level for the past four decades. At the same time, however, the US trade and current account deficits remain large and, absent a significant correction in coming years, would contribute to a further accumulation of US external liabilities. The paper discusses the tension between these two aspects of the dollar assessment, and what factors can help to reconcile them. It focuses in particular on the terms of trade, adjustment lags and measurement issues related to both the REER and the current account balance.     

泛布雷顿森林体系下美国经常项目赤字的可持续性--论美元资产本位的稳定性

在现行国际货币体系即以资产为本位的泛布雷顿森林体系下,中心国家美国和外围亚洲国家形成了双赢的局面。该体系与布雷顿森林体系相比具有更大的安全性和稳定性,美国能够承受更大规模的经常项目赤字,并由此获得了更为灵活的政策操作空间。在某种程度上,美国巨额的经常项目赤字是其雄厚的金融和经济实力的体现。     

Growth and the Current Account in a Small Open Economy

The authors provide a framework with which to analyze growth in a small economy with perfect capital mobility. The framework provides a diagrammatic representation of steady states that differs in interesting and important ways from the usual closed-economy Solow-Swan diagram. The authors use the key diagrams to illustrate the effects of changes in parameters such as the saving rate and productivity growth on steady-state values of macroeconomic aggregates. They compare the steady-state results for the open economy with those obtained using the more familiar closed-economy model. They illustrate the possibility of endogenous income growth.     

The US Current Account, New Economy Services, and Implications for Sustainability

The paper considers the implications for sustainability of the US current account of widespread uptake of New Economy services around the world. The main contribution is to estimate new income elasticities for international trade in New Economy services and incorporate these in a simple model of the current accounts. Widespread uptake of New Economy services around the world improves the potential for a sustainable US external balance through two channels. First, uptake of New Economy services raises global growth. Second, it narrows the asymmetry in income elasticity of US trade. But, reasonable estimates of these two structural improvements are not sufficient to stabilize the US current account deficit.     

The Sustainability of Italian Public Debt and Deficit

In this paper, we analyse the sustainability of Italian public debt using a unique database, reconstructed by Forte (2011), which covers the years 1862–2013. The study focuses on empirical tests for the sustainability and solvency of Italian public finance. The results of unit root and stationarity tests show that public debt and deficit variables are non-stationary at levels, but stationary in first-differences form, or I(1). However, some breaks in the series emerge, given internal and external crises (wars, oil shocks, regime changes, institutional reforms). Therefore, the empirical analysis is conducted for the entire period, as well as two sub-periods (1862–1913 and 1947–2013). In essence, the paper’s results reveal that Italy has sustainability problems in the Republican age (1947-2013). Our Markov-switching dynamic regression model indicates the existence of two distinct states, both for public debt and deficit, with means and standard deviations rather different. Both states are extremely persistent.     

基于MB及ES分析框架估算我国经常性账户失衡

以经常性账户失衡为表现形式的全球失衡水平在2007年,即美国次贷危机全面爆发前达到峰值。早在2006年,中国已跃居成为全球最大的顺差国,现今全球顺差的1／4来自中国。在IMF构建的三种旨在衡量一国经常性账户“合意”水平的框架下,本文对我国外部失衡进行了估算。结果显示,我国经常性账户余额占GDP比重的理论水平约3．12％,2004年以来,我国实际汇率的调整幅度存在一定程度的滞后。加快人民币汇率市场形成机制的改革是治理我国外部失衡的有效手段之一。     

Causal Relationship Between the Current Account and Financial Account

We demonstrate that a different causal relationship exists between the current and financial accounts in developed and developing countries. Using the Granger causality test, we clearly determine that the financial account is by and large responsible for the current account in developing countries; instead of financing the current account, the financial account thrusts the current account into an imbalance. In developed countries, however, the current account leads the way, and the financial account, as its name indicates, serves to finance a current account imbalance. This represents a forewarning that countries, which lack a sophisticated financial system to channel funds to proper locations, should not recklessly liberalize capital mobility.The author would like to thank an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions.     

Nontraded Goods and the Current Account

This paper investigates trade balance and current account behavior in response to various shocks when the economy produces and consumes both traded and nontraded goods. Previous analyses of these problems have interpreted current account behavior in terms of tension between parameters that measure intratemporal and intertemporal elasticity, respectively. This paper provides a simple general criterion for whether trade and current account behavior is "perverse" vis-à-vis the standard one-good model results: behavior is perverse if and only if traded and nontraded goods are Edgeworth complements; that is, if the cross-partial of the instantaneous utility function is positive.     

Does Capital Account Liberalization Discipline Budget Deficit?

The paper investigates whether free capital mobility leads a government to tighten its budget deficit for fear of being penalized from the international capital market. The author tests the hypothesis using three‐stage least squares (3SLS), which can control for the endogenous nature of capital account liberalization. Even the conservative measure shows that, if capital account liberalization were exogenously imposed, ceteris paribus, government budget deficit would be reduced by 2.275% of GDP. Furthermore, 3SLS results show that this disciplinary effect is stronger for countries under a fixed exchange rate regime or for countries with weak central bank independence. The disciplinary effect is also found to be stronger in more recent periods—the 1990s—during which capital market integration has been most prevalent.     

我国赤字财政的可持续性的实证分析

本文在分析财政赤字与税收、国债之间关系的基础上，指出财政赤字的内生性。通过一系列模型证明了以下观点：从长期看，税收的增长速度应小于GDP的增长速度，减税趋势不可避免；国债负担率的增长速度较快；短期内，赤字财政在稳健的货币政策的配合下，对经济增长有一定的积极作用，但长期内对经济增长有一定的负作用；相机抉择不能合理解释经济现实。     

Meaningful Measures of the Current Account

Since the conventional current account uses cash-flow accounting, it is potentially devoid of economic meaning. Assessing foreign assets at market values and including expected transfers from abroad, this paper reports two measures of the external surplus that are grounded in economic theory. The first measure is the aggregate generational current account, annual differences in the sum of net foreign assets across all current and future generations. The second measure is the generational profile of net foreign assets in a benchmark year. These ideas are implemented with data from Korea.     

Productive Government Expenditures and the Current Account

This paper examines the effects of a change in government expenditure on the current account of the balance of payments using the optimizing approach. It is assumed that government expenditure is productive, and is regarded as an input in the aggregate production function. Based on the Blanchard–Fischer-type model, the paper demonstrates decisively that the current account deficit is due to a permanent increase in government expenditure.
JEL Classification Numbers: F41, H30.     

中国经济增长方式转换和增长可持续性

本文考察了中国经济增长方式正在发生的转换,发现改革开放以来我国生产率(TFP)呈上升趋势,最近10年约在3.6%左右。TFP的来源在发生变化,外源性效率提高的因素在下降,技术进步和内源性效率改善的因素在上升。在要素投入方面,教育带来的人力资本质量提高正在替代劳动力数量简单扩张的作用。目前的世界经济危机正在对中国经济增长造成不良影响,但并不是不可克服的。实证分析发现,行政管理成本的膨胀和消费率的持续下降是影响经济增长的两个内在因素。如果能够克服这些负面影响,中国经济在2008—2020年间仍然可能保持9%以上的增长率。     

高投资、宏观成本与经济增长的持续性

过去20多年,中国高投资—高增长的发展模式以宏观成本积累为代价。增长是中国今后相当长时期的主题,但是以高成本为代价的高投资—高增长发展模式的持续性如何?本文从理论上说明了中国高投资的政府激励机制及宏观成本边界和高成本增长的临界点;进而指出,在开放经济中,资本流动、外部需求和供给冲击构成高成本投资模式的现实约束,政府必须权衡粗放式高增长的宏观收益和成本,制定相应的政策来约束低效率的投资行为,实现全社会的福利优化。