How the Dutch government responded to financial,economic and fiscal crisis

This article describes how the Dutch government responded to that country's financial, economic and fiscal crises. The article covers the financial crisis in 2008 when the Dutch government took measures to support and save banks; the economic crisis in 2009, which forced the government to take economic recovery measures; and the resulting fiscal crisis of increasing state debts and budget deficits which led the incoming government in 2010 to begin cutbacks in public expenditure.     

How the German government responded to the financial,economic and fiscal crises

This paper explains the German government's response to the financial, economic and fiscal crises. It covers the financial crisis in 2008 when banks were supported (SoFFin), the economic crisis in 2009, and the fiscal crisis of increasing state debts and budget deficits which caused the German government to cut spending (Sparpaket) in 2010. The author looks at the contents of the government's responses, but also at the political and administrative aspects of the government's decision-making processes.     

Utilization-focused performance reporting

How best to define performance measures is a much-debated issue. Mismatches between goals and indicators can lead to distortions that undermine impact-oriented steering. This article presents a model of goal and indicator development and explains its applicability, benefits and limitations.     

India's fiscal and monetary framework: growth in an opening economy

Since a crisis is a shock impinging on a system, the response can be used to deduce aspects of the system's structure. Analysis of the crisis and recovery suggests aggregate supply in India is elastic but subject to upward shocks. This has implications for cyclical policy and for fiscal consolidation. Both monetary and fiscal policy should identify measures that would reduce costs, while avoiding too large a demand contraction. Specific policies are identified and Indian policies evaluated.     

银行业危机:金融泡沫视角的分析

自20世纪80年代以来,银行业危机爆发越显频繁。然而,通过对银行业危机内部形成机理分析可以发现,银行业危机的爆发其实是伴随着金融泡沫的形成与破灭这一过程的。在金融泡沫的形成过程中,银行往往会给一些高风险行业发放贷款,从而增加银行经营风险;而在金融泡沫破灭之后,这将直接或间接地导致银行产生大量的不良贷款,从而使银行业危机最终爆发。因此,我国应尽快化解国有商业银行的不良资产;完善银行微观治理结构;建立和完善金融监管机制。     

Local fiscal equalisation based on fiscal capacity: the case of Austria

This paper deals with local fiscal equalisation in Austria. The system of intergovernmental relations in Austria includes different regulations in order to equalise differences in the fiscal capacity of the municipalities. This leads to so‐called ‘compensation effects’, because additional revenues from a local government's own tax are (at least partly) compensated by losses from equalisation grants. This paper carries out a detailed analysis of these compensation effects. It is shown that they create strong fiscal disincentives for the local governments: on average, 55 per cent of additional revenues from the communal tax (which is the most important of a local government's own taxes) are compensated by losses of equalisation grants. In extreme cases, local governments can lose up to 144 per cent of the additional tax yields collected. These local governments would be better off if they made no effort to increase their tax base.     

Economic crisis and determinants of solvency in the insurance sector: new evidence from Spain

This paper analyses the factors that determine the solvency of insurance companies operating in Spain. The selected time span, from 2008 to 2015, encompasses a period of economic instability characterised by record low interest rates and low or even negative economic growth. Using a dynamic panel data model, we conclude that actual solvency margins are positively related to profitability, underwriting risk and a mutual-type organisation but inversely related to size, reinsurance use, longer-tailed business and life insurance specialisation. We also find that less concentrated markets and the context of an economic crisis decrease solvency margins.     

我国财政风险形成原因的实证研究

本文对影响财政风险5个定性方面的原因进行了量化,构建了一组分析模型,采用1980年～2008年的数据,运用主成份回归分析方法对模型进行了精炼和实证检验。研究认为,我国的经济增长速度、货币供应量与政府收入赤字率正相关。地方经济竞赛对财政风险的影响非常复杂,一方面会导致地方以债务积累为代价实现经济增长,另一方面在一定程度上有利于控制赤字率的过快上升。财税体制不合理是财政风险形成的重要原因。     

How the euro-area sovereign-debt crisis led to a collapse in bank equity prices

We quantify the linkages among banks’ equity performance and indicators of sovereign stress by using panel GMM to estimate a three-equation system that examines the impact of sovereign stress, as reflected in both sovereign spreads and sovereign ratings, on bank share prices. We use data for a panel of five euro-area stressed countries. Our findings indicate that a recursive relationship between sovereigns and banks operated during the euro-area crisis. Specifically, for the five crisis countries considered shocks to sovereign spreads fed-through to sovereign ratings, which affected commercial banks’ equity-prices. Our results also point to the importance of using levels of equity prices – rather than rates of return – in measuring banks’ performance. The use of levels allows us to derive the determinants of long-run equity prices.     

Management or Politics – or Both? How Management by Objectives May be Managed: A Swedish Example

Rather than manage the government administration in a systematic fashion, the Swedish Government reacts to all sorts of unsystematic information. Thereby, it ignores the decision-model that it has decided to employ. This situation has been criticised, and a coupling of practice to the decision-model has been recommended. However, while the political leaders have not found arguments to renounce a management approach to government, neither have they found means to employ it. In this article, it is suggested that a situation with two decision-models – one that is discussed but not used, and one that is used but not discussed – is a functional solution to this dilemma. Frequent criticism of this situation may help sustain it.     

有效政府:信息社会公共财政管理的基本理念

有效政府是一个拥有多维度效率标准的政府.以有效政府的理念支持和指导下的公共财政管理,必须实现由无限到有限、由命令到服务、由人治到法治、由部门到公共的转变,建设公共型、法治型、分权型、民主型和效率型财政.     

中国银行业注资辨析

当前这场国际金融危机下,各国纷纷实施注资行为救助问题银行.而我国政府曾多次向国有银行等金融机构实施过各种形式的注资,中国银行业的注资问题也一直受到了学术界与实务部门的普遍关注.本文旨在从中西方对比的视角,探讨中国银行业注资的背景、方式、期限选择的特殊性所在.     

The global financial crisis and integration in European retail banking

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to investigate the integration process within the European Union retail banking sector by analysing deposit and lending rates to the household sector during the period 2003–2011. Secondly, to assess the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on the banking integration process, an area that is yet unexplored. An important contribution of the paper is the application of the recently developed Phillips and Sul (2007a) panel convergence methodology which has not hitherto been employed in this area. This method analyses the degree as well as the speed of convergence, identifies the presence of club formation, and measures the behaviour of each country’s transition path relative to the panel average. The empirical results point to the presence of convergence in all deposit and lending rates to the household sector up to 2007. In sharp contrast, the null of convergence is rejected in all deposit and credit markets after the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. These results show that the global crisis has had a detrimental effect on the banking integration process. We find some convergence in a few sub-clusters of countries but the rate of convergence is typically slow and several countries are identified as diverging altogether. In addition, we find that the credit market, in general, is far more heterogeneous than the savings market.     

中国银行业注资辨析

当前这场国际金融危机下,各国纷纷实施注资行为救助问题银行。而我国政府曾多次向国有银行等金融机构实施过各种形式的注资,中国银行业的注资问题也一直受到了学术界与实务部门的普遍关注。本文旨在从中西方对比的视角,探讨中国银行业注资的背景、方式、期限选择的特殊性所在。     

Crisis transmission: Some evidence from the Asian financial crisis

We used a crisis measure of financial market as defined by Sexena (1998) to study the nature of crisis transmission and the channels through which the 1997 crisis was transmitted among Asian financial markets. Estimated with a vector autoregression (VAR) and an OLS model on Asian financial markets from January 1990 to December 1998, we found that:

1.

During the crisis period, crisis transmission was more significant than during other noncrisis periods;

2.

Comparing the crisis transmission within the industrialized countries (Taiwan, Korea, and Japan), within the emerging countries (Thailand, Malaysia, The Philippines, and Indonesia), and between the industrialized and emerging groups, it is shown that

2.1.

The crisis transmission among the three industrialized countries was not significant.

2.2.

The crises originated from Thailand and Malaysia were transmitted to other emerging countries.

2.3.

The crisis transmission between industrialized and emerging countries was not found to be significant. There was evidence showing that Singapore served as an intermediary transmitting crisis between industrialized and emerging countries during this particular crisis.

3.

The transmission through the wake-up call effect was found to be more significant than other transmission channels. Trade relationship and cash-in effects only existed in Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia.

     

Economists in the 2008 financial crisis: Slow to see,fast to act

We study the economics- and finance-scholars’ reaction to the 2008 financial crisis using machine learning language analyses methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and dynamic topic modelling algorithms, to analyze the texts of 14,270 NBER working papers covering the 1999–2016 period. We find that academic scholars as a group were insufficiently engaged in crises’ studies before 2008. As the crisis unraveled, however, they switched their focus to studying the crisis, its causes, and consequences. Thus, the scholars were “slow-to-see,” but they were “fast-to-act.” Their initial response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis is consistent with these conclusions.     

国际金融危机下的政策调整：宏观波动与微观行为如何联动

全球不平衡导致的金融危机在造成宏观经济大幅波动的同时,也对微观层次的企业和家庭带来了巨大冲击。因此,政策调整应致力于协调宏观波动与微观行为之间的关系,避免出现宏观与微观的不一致性。为此,量化宽松的货币政策应把握经济增长与通货膨胀之间的关系,财政政策应克服“二次探底”的潜在挑战,而人民币国际化则将增强中国在国际货币体系中的话语权,并从根本上克服被迫的外汇储备累积和“货币错配”。     

The influence of the nature of government accounting and reporting in decision-making: evidence from Switzerland

A key objective of government accounting and reporting has been to achieve accountability and its use in that respect has been well documented, however its use for decision-making has had less coverage. This article addresses the latter issue, providing evidence from Switzerland that the accounting basis used (accrual versus cash) influences decision-making. This is the result of the effect that the different approaches have on the nature of the information used for decision-making. Switzerland was among the first western democracies to adopt accrual accounting at both state (canton) and local levels of government in the 1980s. The Swiss federal government followed in 2007. The main examples of the use of accrual information in decision-making are: the focus on self-financing of investments in order to control borrowing, as well as the fiscal policy targets of debt reduction and maintenance of capital. All three require accrual basis information. Therefore accrual basis information is key in fiscal decision-making in Switzerland.     

Lean in a cold fiscal climate: the public sector in an age of reduced resources

Reflecting on recent public sector reform, this paper examines the use of Lean during a period of financial austerity. The paper outlines several challenges for public sector organizations as they manage performance targets, and engage in service re-design. The author challenges the current use of Lean working arguing for a re-evaluation of the traditional public sector model of work and for a collective approach to co-production of service redesign.