The Swedish external position and the krona

Introduction  This paper addresses the dynamics of the Swedish external position, with a particular focus on its inter-relation with the external value of the krona. Materials and methods  We argue that financial globalisation means that a broader conceptual framework is required, whereby exchange rate fluctuations operate through the ‘valuation channel’ of external adjustment, in addition to the traditional trade balance channel. In the other direction, we highlight that the projected trend for the trade balance is an important influence on the long-term prospects for the krona. Conclusion  Finally, we seek to assess the future direction for the Swedish net foreign asset position by investigating the likely impact of demographic change and shifts in the Swedish position in the world income distribution.

International Risk Sharing and Government Moral Hazard

This paper analyzes incentive problems caused by international risk sharing. They arise because international risk sharing contributes to the insurance of domestic consumption and thus lowers governments’ incentives to increase output. We show that the resulting distortions can lead to substantial efficiency losses. Complete risk sharing is, therefore, undesirable and the optimal degree of risk sharing may be low. Furthermore, we show that households’ risk sharing decisions are socially inefficient and are effectively maximizing government moral hazard. As a result, financial innovation and integration may reduce welfare by increasing households’ risk sharing opportunities.

Funding Shocks and Optimal University Admissions and Financial Aid Policies

A positive shock to funding, such as a major donation, causes an optimizing university to raise its admissions standards and reduce tuition charges net of financial aid across all student categories. However, the shock’s effect on enrollment may not be uniform. Student categories given little weight in the university’s objective function may be treated as inferior goods; that is, positive shocks decrease their enrollments, while other student categories’ enrollments are increased. The paper’s findings shed light on the effect of federal direct-to-student aid on tuition levels, permitting a new perspective on William Bennett’s controversial hypothesis that aid accommodates tuition hikes.

Evaluating China’s Integration in World Trade with a Gravity Model Based Benchmark

This paper assesses China’s “natural” place in the world economy with a new set of trade integration indicators, which are used as a benchmark in order to examine whether China’s share in international trade is consistent with fundamentals such as economic size, location and other relevant factors. They constitute a better measure of trade integration that incorporates many more factors than traditional openness ratios. The model tracks international trade well and confirms that China is already well integrated in world markets, particularly with North America, several Latin American and East Asian emerging markets and most euro area countries.

From the Asian crisis to the global credit crisis: reforming the international financial architecture redux

2008 was marked by the tenth anniversary of the Asian crisis and the debate over how to reform the international financial architecture but also by the outbreak of the most serious global credit crisis in generations. This paper reviews the debate over how to strengthen the international monetary and financial system in this light. An earlier version of this paper was presented to a meeting of the Tokyo Club, Tokyo, Japan, 11–12 November 2008. Comments of the participants there and of the editors of this journal are acknowledged with thanks. I am grateful as well to the Tokyo Club for permission to publish this revised version. Financial support from the Coleman Fund Risk Management Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley is acknowledged with thanks.

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Public Spending Management and Macroeconomic Interdependence

This paper studies the domestic and international effects of “public competition policies” aimed at improving the efficiency of public spending. Such measures are modeled as an increase in the price elasticity of public consumption. The paper finds that public competition policies significantly affect macroeconomic interdependence across countries, both through the impact of the international elasticity of substitution and of mark-up effects. The paper also develops an extension in which fiscal shocks are stochastic. In welfare terms, countries with a larger government sector have an incentive to promote global public competition policies regardless of whether fiscal policy is modeled as deterministic or stochastic.

Does financial integration make banks more vulnerable? Regulation,foreign owned banks,and the lender-of-last resort

We describe a simple model in which banks’ prudential efforts and public regulation can reduce the probability of bankruptcy. Focusing on the European example, we contrast the national case with an integrated banking market and find that banks will exert, and public regulators will demand, greater prudential effort to monitor their bank’s activities. Thus, financial integration may increase voluntary prudential behavior by banks, avoid a regulatory “race to the bottom,” and improve the soundness of the financial system. Along similar lines, we show that the absence of a dedicated lender of last resort within the euro area can reduce the probability of financial crisis. Despite these findings, the overall level of regulatory activity may remain suboptimal from a European perspective. We also discuss incentives for European banks to organize their foreign holdings in branches or subsidiaries.

The Transfer Problem in the Euro Area

Building on the celebrated Keynes–Ohlin debate and on Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (Rev Econ Stat 86:841–857, 2004), the paper investigates the transfer problem for the Euro area vis-à-vis the rest of the world. The analysis is developed in a theoretically and statistically consistent way and is intended as a contribution to the empirical literature on EMU. The main result of the paper is that the accumulation of net foreign asset in the Euro area is consistent with real exchange appreciation, largely through the relative price of nontradables rather than through the terms of trade.

UK External Imbalances and the Sterling: Are they on a Sustainable Path?

An updated version of Krugman’s 1993 MMF framework is used to consider the implications of buoyant domestic demand for the real exchange rate and debt dynamics. The updating includes a Taylor rule for monetary policy and explicit treatment of external assets and liabilities. In response to an exogenous rise in the aggregate demand, short-run appreciation of the real exchange rate is followed by a prolonged decline as external debt accumulates and net wealth deteriorates. Whether in equilibrium the real exchange rate is stronger or weaker depends crucially on a comparison of real interest rates and the growth rate. If the domestic growth rate is higher than global real interest rates, the currency may strengthen in the long run despite the deterioration of net external assets. To see whether the strength of sterling is sustainable, the analysis is briefly calibrated to UK data over the last decade. Blanchard et al. (The US current account and the dollar. CEPR DP no 4888, 2005) suggest that international liabilities to be treated as imperfect substitutes: so we check to see how this would affect our results.

Connecting National Safety Nets: The Dialectics of the Basel II Contracting Process

Basel II consists of supervisory guidelines negotiated by representatives of central banks and national regulatory commissions that were members of the Basel committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). The BCBS is itself a regulatory response to globalization, which is connecting national safety nets in market-driven ways. A country’s financial safety net is a social contract established by short-lived agents for principals in long-lived economic sectors. Restraints placed on the authority of the BCBS members to contract for their principals by domestic politics explains: why Basel II authorizes individual countries to implement the agreement in markedly different ways; why US implementation of Basel II ran into so much doubt, controversy, and delay; and how the implementation debate set small and large banks and the Federal Reserve and other federal regulators against one another.

Overall trade specialization and economic development: countries diversify

This paper provides evidence for an aspect of trade often disregarded in international trade research: countries’ sectoral export diversification. The results of our semiparametric empirical analysis show that, on average, countries do not specialize; on the contrary, they diversify. Our results are robust for different statistical indices used to measure trade specialization, for the level of sectoral aggregation, and for the level of smoothing in the nonparametric term associated with per capita income. Using a generalized additive model (GAM) with country-specific fixed effects it can be shown that, controlling for countries’ heterogeneity, sectoral export diversification increases with income.

The Portuguese Economy in the Irish Mirror, 1960–2004

The deepening of economic and financial integration in the European Union has led to different responses in the group of ‘cohesion’ countries. Ireland and Portugal stand out as the two extreme examples, as Ireland caught-up to the forerunners after the launching of EMU, in 1992, whereas Portugal lost ground. This paper looks at structural shifts in order to explain different economic performances within Europe. We conclude that Portugal’s labour productivity lag was the outcome of a less favourable structure of employment; that differences in the structure of employment are not clustered in specific industries; and that such structural differences are associated with different factor endowments, namely physical and human capital. Portugal has a rising competitiveness problem in international markets as real wages have increased faster than labour productivity in the 1990s. That has to be changed by policy measures, by the market through higher levels of unemployment, or by a combination of both.

Resurrecting Keynes to Stabilize the International Monetary System

We adapt the basic principles of the Keynes Plan and argue for the creation of a supranational bank money (SBM) that would coexist along side national currencies and for the establishment of a new international clearing union (NICU). These principles remain timely because the fundamental causes of the instability of the international monetary system are as valid today as they were in the early forties. The new supranational money would be created against domestic earning assets of the Fed and the ECB and its quantity would be demand-driven. Our proposal is not an agreement on exchange rates, which while possible is not essential to the functioning of the SBM. NICU would not hold open positions in assets denominated in national currency and consequently would not bear exchange rate risk. NICU would be more than an office recording credit and debit entries of the supranational bank money. The financial tsunami that hit the world economy in 2007–2008 provides a unique opportunity for a coordinated strategy.

International Reserves: Precautionary Versus Mercantilist Views,Theory and Evidence

This paper compares the importance of precautionary and mercantilist motives in the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries. Overall, empirical results support precautionary motives; in particular, a more liberal capital account regime increases international reserves. Theoretically, large precautionary demand for international reserves arises as a self-insurance to avoid costly liquidation of long-term projects when the economy is susceptible to sudden stops. The welfare gain from the optimal management of international reserves is of a first-order magnitude, reducing the welfare cost of liquidity shocks from a first-order to a second-order magnitude.

Welfare State, Market Imperfections, and International Trade

Within a two-sector-two-country model of trade with aggregate scale economies and unionisation, a more generous welfare state in one country increases welfare in that country and can have positive spillover effects on the other. Furthermore, synchronised expansions of social security are more welfare enhancing than unilateral ones. Our results counter the fears that a race to the bottom in social standards may result from the ‘shrinking-tax-base’ entailed by international capital mobility. While affecting trade patterns and income distribution, capital mobility interacts with welfare state policies in increasing welfare, even when capital flows out of the country that initiates the shock.

Policy coordination in East Asia and across the Pacific

In this paper, we construct a macro-econometric model that describes the economic activity in the Asia-Pacific area and provide quantitative insights into the recent policy debates on monetary and currency coordination among the East Asian economies. The model includes a wide variety of monetary and currency policy rules that the East Asian economies adopt and allows for one country's policymaking to have substantial effects on foreign countries. We apply the model to three current policy issues: (1) the desirability of currency basket pegs in East Asia, (2) the anticipated effects of China's currency policy reform, and (3) the non-negativity constraint on Japanese nominal interest rates. The simulation analyses show the external economy effects of policy rules quantitatively and suggest the difficulty of monetary and currency policy coordination among the East Asian economies.

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Monetary Policy Analysis in a Small Open Credit-Based Economy

This paper describes a simple framework for monetary policy analysis in a small open economy where bank credit is the only source of external finance. At the heart of the model is the link between banks’ lending rates (which incorporate a premium over and above the marginal cost of borrowing) and firms’ net worth. In contrast to models in the Stiglitz-Weiss or Kiyotaki-Moore tradition, the supply of bank loans is perfectly elastic at the prevailing rate. The central bank sets the refinance rate and provides unlimited access to liquidity at that rate. The model is used to study the effects of changes in official interest rates, under both fixed and flexible exchange rates. Various extensions are also discussed, including income effects, the cost channel, the role of land as collateral, and dollarization.

Liberalization of EU telecommunications and trade: theory, gravity equation analysis and policy implications

The liberalization of telecommunications has contributed to considerable price reductions in international telephony and to rising volumes of telecommunications. This raises the issue of the economic impact of international telephony. Falling international information and transaction costs should stimulate competition and enlarge the market radius for producers in the tradables sector—this lets us to expect trade creation effects of international telecommunications; this in turn should raise output provided that more intensive international telecommunications stimulates international diffusion of knowledge or brings about trade-related specialization gains. Based on a modified gravity equation which is taking into account the role of international telecommunication volumes—based on new ITU data—we show that international telephony has a significant positive impact on trade volume: A rise of the international telecommunications volume by 10% raises trade by 2% in Europe. At the same time the coefficients of the traditional variables, GDP in the exporting and the importing country, are smaller than in traditional approaches. Thus from a policy perspective the modernization and growth of the international telecommunications network—within a system of enhanced competition—is crucial for Europe: economic integration will be reinforced. From this perspective the Lisbon Agenda is right to emphasize the importance of creating a digitally networked knowledge society.

The choice of inflation targeting—an empirical investigation

A growing number of countries have anchored their monetary policy to an explicit numerical rate or range of inflation since such an inflation targeting framework was first adopted by New Zealand in 1989. This paper empirically investigates economic structure and institutional factors associated with a country’s choice of inflation targeting using a dataset of 66 countries for the period of 1980–2000. It is found that a sound fiscal position is significantly and positively associated with the choice of inflation targeting framework; the central bank is more likely to adopt inflation targeting with greater financial depth; institutional capacity including central bank autonomy and flexible exchange rate regime is important for the choice of inflation targeting.

Market structure and the link between migration and trade

Many recent studies have looked at the impact of international migration on trade and found a significant effect. They posit that migration fosters trade by lowering costs or by means of a preference bias. However, to my knowledge, market structure has not as yet been considered. Using data from Switzerland, this paper empirically assesses the extent to which migration affects trade, taking goods differentiation into account. A monopolistic model with a multisector economy (Chaney in Am Econ Rev 98(41):1707–1721, 2008) is then empirically estimated. The findings show that market structure explains the different channels through which migration affects trade.