Real interest rates,inflation and the open economy: A regime-switching perspective on Australia and New Zealand

We investigate the time-series properties of Australian and New Zealand real interest rates within a Markov-switching framework. This enables us to identify characteristics in real interest rate behavior hitherto unacknowledged. We find that rates switch between alternative stationary regimes characterized by differing means, speeds of mean-reversion and volatility. For New Zealand, high rates of inflation increase the probability of remaining in a regime characterized by a faster speed of adjustment. Further application of this methodology considers the real interest rate differential between Australia and New Zealand and points to differing regimes based on volatility rather than persistence.     

Real exchange rates,economic performance,and trade balances in the central european free trade association

The relationships between real exchange rates dynamics, domestic economic growth, and external economic positions are examined for four East European countries: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Results show that in Poland the dynamic of the trade balance is independent of both the real exchange rate and industrial production. In both Hungary and Slovakia, trade balances appear to have strong autonomous components, albeit in circumstances where the influence of real exchange rates and industrial production dynamics cannot be entirely denied. The Czech Republic's situation is, however, substantially different from its Central European Free Trade Assocation partners. The growing trade balance deficit appears to be determined by both the continuing real appreciation of the Czech currency and a mildly accelerating industrial production growth. Both are the consequence of accelerating capital inflow.     

Immigration and Unemployment: New evidence from Australia and New Zealand

This study uses a new Granger no-causality testing procedure developed by Toda &Yamamoto (1995) to contribute to the debate on immigration and unemployment in Australia and New Zealand. It investigates a possible causal linkage between these variables in a six-variable vector autoregression (VAR) model. The research finds no Granger causality between immigration and unemployment. Instead, it finds evidence of Granger causality running from industrial structural changes, measured by the Stoikov and HDB indices, to unemployment, and from several other economic variables to unemployment.     

Nominal and real effective exchange rates of middle eastern countries and their trade performance

Indexes of real and nominal effective exchange rates that are published by the IMF, are mostly for industrial countries. None of the Middle Eastern countries have received any attention on this regard. This paper tries to close the gap by constructing such indexes for 11 middle eastern countries over 1971(I)–1994(IV) period. As an application, long-run response of their trade balance to devaluation is also investigated.     

Real exchange rates,asset prices and terms of trade: A theoretical analysis

This paper develops a continuous-time two-country dynamic equilibrium model, in which the real exchange rates, asset prices, and terms of trade are jointly determined in the presence of nontradable goods. The model determines the relation between the financial markets and real goods markets in the world economy and their responses to various shocks under the home bias assumption. A positive domestic supply shock induces a positive return on the domestic asset markets and a deterioration of terms of trade that improves the foreign output and boosts the foreign asset markets. Demand shocks act in the opposite way. This model also analyses the impact of change in the relative price of nontradable to tradable goods on the terms of trade and asset markets. A higher productivity growth in tradable goods than in nontradable goods leads to a higher relative price of nontradable to tradable goods, which appreciates the real exchange rate, deteriorates the terms of trade, and depresses the domestic and foreign asset markets. A lower relative price of nontradable goods depreciates the real exchange rate, improves the terms of trade, and lifts both the domestic and foreign asset markets.     

澳大利亚、新西兰政府扶持小企业发展的经验及思考

加强政府对小企业发展的扶持,创新扶持的方式,是我国经济发展中面临的课题。作者通过对澳大利亚、新西兰扶持小企业发展情况的考察,论述了两国政府对小企业管理和扶持的系统做法,重点介绍了澳大利亚政府所资助的商业企业服务中心(简称BEC)的职能、体系、运作方式、服务内容和标准,阐述了政府对BEC实施管理和服务的方式方法,并结合作者所在市实际,对地方政府借鉴澳、新经验构筑中小企业服务平台,运用市场机制发展类似商业企业服务中心等机构,加强对中小企业的政策扶持,提高支持中小企业发展的组织程序提出了对策建议。     

Terms of trade movements and the global economic crisis

Dramatic changes in the relative prices of goods in international trade have accompanied, and indeed preceded, the recent global crisis. The causes and effects of the relative price changes are analysed by applying the analysis of business cycles developed by Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s analysis emphasises innovation and structural change (particularly creative destruction) which impart uneven development on the economy and can foster financial crises. This puts the current crisis in the context of long-wave development of the capitalist system and leads to predictions about the likely path of price and output changes over the next few decades.     

Production, trade, prices, exchange rates and equilibration in large experimental economies

We study market equilibration in laboratory economies that are larger and more complex than any that have been studied experimentally to date. Complexity is derived from the fact that the economies are “international” in economic structure with multiple input, output, and foreign exchange markets in operation. The economies have twenty-one markets and due to the fact that they have roughly fifty agents, the economies are characterized by several hundred equations. In spite of the complexity and interdependence of the economy, the results demonstrate the substantial power of the general equilibrium model of perfect competition to predict the direction of movement of market-level variables. Empirical patterns in the convergence process are explored and described.     

The Australia — New Zealand Farm Problem and the Appropriate Role of Government

Almost throughout the world, farm incomes tend to be low and unstable compared with incomes in other industries, except where heavily subsidised. This instability has become all the more serious because fluctuations have been around a long-term downward trend in the fortunes of agriculture which commenced probably prior to World War I. The long-run world-wide farm problem is an inevitable consequence of economic growth, which results in a surplus of farmers, and especially of small farmers. We must recognise the quite intractable nature of the long-term world-wide component of the problem, as distinct from what can be blamed on our governments, and on the short-term to medium-term world market situation. Temporary assistance policy should centre on facilitating adjustment. The ad hoc, inefficient and inequitable palliatives of the past should be avoided. Short-term assistance should be consistent with longer term objectives for industry development: it should not include output-based subsidies that encourage continued overproduction and usually provide most assistance to those in least need. The emphasis should be on welfare-type assistance based on the individual rather than industry-wide aid.     

Convergence in Productivity Across Industries: Some Results for New Zealand and Australia

New Zealand shares a wealth of common interests and experiences with Australia. This has tempted some to assume that these economies form an ‘Economic Club’, in which one would expect to identify common aggregate trends and growth experiences. In this paper we present results that test, and generally reject, convergence in labour productivity across Australia and New Zealand, using both aggregate and disaggregate, industry‐level data. We find that only two industries satisfy our definition of Conditional Convergence (Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing and Cultural and Recreational Services), and that the Mining and Wholesale Trade industries have particularly important roles to play in explaining the measured divergence. Cointegration‐based tests reveal more stochastic trends governing Australian productivity than in New Zealand. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the underlying growth processes of the two economies are fundamentally different, thereby questioning the relevance of aggregate comparisons between them. New evidence using industry‐level data does not, therefore, resolve the aggregate‐level ‘non‐convergence puzzle’ identified here, and elsewhere.     

Real exchange rates and competitiveness

This paper examines indicators of competitiveness. It analyses the conceptual foundations of conventional measures of the real exchange rate and finds that inferences about competitiveness from these indicators require strong, and in many cases implausible, assumptions. Based on this analysis some alternative measures are proposed and their use is illustrated using data from Europe. Given the usefulness of standardised indicators, four simple charts are proposed; these help solve some conundrums in the European data and provide the basis for a richer set of inferences about competitiveness.This paper has benefited from discussions with Bob Traa, from comments by Lars Svensson and many colleagues in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and from the analysis inMarston (1986). The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be construed as representing the position of the IMF.     

On exchange rates and efficiency

Summary This paper analyzes an exchange economy in which several assets serve as stores of value and where agents have completely heterogeneous preferences and endowments. It describes the set of perfect foresight equilibria in which all assets have positive prices. There are international policies with determinate exchange rates if the world economy satisfies a strong efficiency criterion. Also, the corresponding equilibrium allocations are in the core of the world economy for certain international policies. Hence, a system of fixed exchange rates can support efficient allocations to the extent that countries agree on a division of seigniorage in the creation of international reserves.I would like to thank an annonymous referee, Suchan Chae, Mike Woodford, Ken Kasa, Helen Popper, Kathryn Marshall, and seminar participants at the University of Kansas, the Federal Reserve board, the 1990 meetings of the Western Economic Association, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, and Victoria University of Wellington for comments on earlier drafts.     

Exchange rate volatility and United Kingdom trade: evidence from Canada,Japan and New Zealand

This paper investigates the influence of exchange rate volatility on the real imports of the United Kingdom from Canada, Japan and New Zealand during the period 1980–2003. The Johansen multivariate cointegration method and the constrained error correction (general-to-specific) method are applied to study the relationship between real imports and its determinants (including exchange rate volatility). Conditional variance from the GARCH(1,1) model is applied as exchange rate volatility. Both nominal and real exchange rates are employed in the empirical study. Results indicate a significant effect of the exchange rate volatility on real imports. These exchange rate volatility effects are mostly positive. The author thanks an anonymous referee, the editor and Myles Wallace for several useful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors and omissions are the author’s responsibility alone.     

Exchange rates and trade: How important is hysteresis in trade?

This paper looks at the responsiveness of a country's export supply to exchange rate changes and measures its quantitative importance by breaking down export adjustments between changes in output levels by existing exporters (intensive margin) and movements due to changes in the number of exporters (extensive margin). Using data on a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing firms, the paper finds sunk costs hysteresis in entry and exit to be an important factor in determining export market participation, but unrelated to exchange rate uncertainty. The sunk costs of entering the market appear to be much larger than the costs of exiting the market. Finally, although hysteresis exists, its effect on the responsiveness of aggregate trade volumes to exchange rate changes is quantitatively small. A 10% home currency depreciation results in an increases in export volume due to the increase in the number of exporting firms of only 1.4% of export volume.     

On the trade impact of nominal exchange rate volatility

What is the effect of nominal exchange rate variability on trade? I argue that the methods conventionally used to answer this perennial question are plagued by a variety of sources of systematic bias. I propose a novel approach that simultaneously addresses all of these biases, and present new estimates from a broad sample of countries from 1970 to 1997. The estimates indicate that nominal exchange rate variability has no significant impact on trade flows.     

Interest expectations and exchange rates news

Using a new survey data set ofmatched exchange rate and interest rate expectations for eight currencies relative to the German mark, we examine empirically the relationship between exchange rate returns, news and risk premia. News on interest differentials enters significantly in equations for the difference between the spot rate and the lagged forward rate for the British pound, Japanese yen, Spanish peseta and the US dollar. An unexpected rise in the interest rate differential tends to strengthen the domestic exchange rate. For each of these currencies, we also find significant effects of our ex-ante measure of the risk premium. In addition, we investigate the effect of lagged interest rate differentials as proxy for the risk premium and find that they do not capture time-varying risk premia as is widely suggested in the literature, but probably capture a peso-problem, learning about a policy change, a market-inefficiency or a combination of these factors.     

Terms of trade and domestic distribution: Export-led growth with abundant labour

A general equilibrium macro model is constructed to explore effects of export-led growth policies on the terms of trade and the domestic distribution of a developing region with abundant labour. This region, the South, trades with another, the North; they have different technologies and supplies of factors. It is shown that under certain conditions of dualism in the production of goods and of abundant labour supply in the South, an increase in the volume of exports from the South may bring about a sustained worsening of the South's terms of trade with the North even if this increase in exports is due to a positive shift in demand from the North. This change in the terms of trade is accompanied by a sustained loss of purchasing power of wages within the South. These results take place in a Walrasian stable market. When technologies are more homogenous and labour less abundant, the results are reversed: increased exports will take place together with improvements in terms of trade and a tendency to equalise factor prices between the regions. The results argue for coordination of domestic and international policies with special attention to technologies and labour markets.