Capital liberalization and the US external imbalance

Differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances. This paper focuses on cross-country heterogeneity in access to international financial markets that derives from the presence of capital controls and argues that the process of capital liberalization over the past decades can explain a substantial fraction of US net external liabilities. We present a simple two-country model with an internationally traded bond, in which capital controls are reflected in the presence of borrowing and lending constraints on that bond. In a US versus the rest of the world (RoW) scenario, we perform experiments that are largely consistent with countries' liberalization experiences. A reduction in the RoW's controls on capital outflows and/or a tightening in the RoW's borrowing constraint enable the US economy to better insure against consumption risk relative to the rest of the world, and therefore decrease its motives for precautionary asset holdings relative to the rest of the world. As a result of these asymmetric shifts in countries' barriers to capital mobility, the US runs a long run external deficit.     

On the impact of US subsidies on world cotton prices: A meta-analysis approach

Despite the literature dealing with the impact of subsidies on world cotton prices, there is no consensus regarding the quantification of these effects. The aim of this article is to contribute to this literature through the implementation of a meta-regression analysis. This methodology allows us to: (i) identify the main sources of heterogeneity between the primary studies, (ii) give some tracks to improve the modeling, (iii) provide a reliable effect of the removal of subsidies on world cotton prices. Relying on the estimation of various models to derive robust results, our findings show that a withdrawal of US subsidies would increase the world cotton price by around 11% on average.     

Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda

This paper examines the extent to which various regions, and the world as a whole, could gain from multilateral trade reform over the next decade. The World Bank's Linkage model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade barriers and agricultural subsidies, and then of possible outcomes from the WTO's Doha Round. The results suggest moving to free global merchandise trade would boost real incomes in sub‐Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (and in Cairns Group countries) proportionately more than in other developing countries or high‐income countries. Real returns to farmland and unskilled labour, and real net farm incomes, would rise substantially in those developing‐country regions, thereby helping to reduce poverty. A Doha partial liberalisation could take the world some way towards those desirable outcomes, but more so the more agricultural subsidies are disciplined and applied tariffs are cut, and the more not just high‐income but also developing countries choose to engage in the process of reform.     

BALANCE OF PAYMENTS‐CONSTRAINED GROWTH IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

The paper clarifies some issues raised in the basic model of balance of payments‐constrained growth due to Thirlwall and later extensions by Thirlwall and Hussain and Moreno‐Brid. The model is also adapted to include both interest payments and net transfers. The latter variable has become very important to many developing countries and brings a new dimension to the analysis. Very importantly, net transfers are positively related to foreign income and negatively related to domestic income. Thus, the paper accounts for dynamic feedback effects, between net transfers, domestic and world income.     

The optimal tax on antebellum US cotton exports

The US produced about 80% of the world’s cotton in the decades prior to the Civil War. How much monopoly power did the US possess in the world cotton market and what would have been the effect of an optimal export tax? This paper estimates the elasticity of foreign demand for US cotton exports and uses the elasticity in a simple partial equilibrium model to calculate the optimal export tax and its effect on prices, trade, and welfare. The results indicate that the export demand elasticity for US cotton was about −1.7 and that the optimal export tax of about 50% would have raised US welfare by about $10 million, about 0.3% of US GDP or about 1% of the South’s GDP.     

Incentives for Loan Repayments: Evidence from a Randomized Field Study

This field experiment tests an innovative approach for helping automobile loan borrowers make their loan payments on time. Borrowers were randomly assigned to a loan with an interest rate reduction after three on‐time payments; borrowers assigned to this loan show fewer late payments compared to a control group. While the financial incentive of the interest rate reduction was small, the offer of a rate reduction appears to result in borrowers attending to due dates. This result illustrates that lenders can use simple mechanisms to encourage more positive repayment patterns among borrowers with a history of late payments.     

美国次按贷危机剖析

随着美国住房价格逐渐回落,利率不断上升,次贷的借款人越来越难以按期偿付贷款,导致次贷及相关的证券投资产品损失严重,一些贷款机构、投资银行、对冲基金纷纷出现巨额亏损,甚至倒闭,由房价引发次按贷危机的爆发。次按贷危机暴露出评级机构对结构性金融产品信用评估体制上的缺陷和中间人的道德风险严重。次按贷危机对全球各种金融产品价格产生很大的冲击．并从各个方面都对全球经济产生了深远的影响。     

追加配额后棉花进口对我国棉花产业的影响及规律——以华北地区为例

文章主要从棉花价格、棉农收益和棉花收购企业三方面分析追加棉花进口配额对我国棉花产业的影响,进而得出其形成的规律:配额发放两个月后,国内市场价格开始下降;追加配额的时间和数量决定价格下降幅度;滑准税率下,关税配额的管理方法更能起到保护国棉的作用.针对影响及规律,提出在WTO框架下,采取积极措施应对棉花进口对国内棉花产业造成的冲击.     

Would Freeing Up World Trade Reduce Poverty and Inequality? The Vexed Role of Agricultural Distortions

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in non‐farm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects are unclear without empirical modelling. This article summarises a series of new economy‐wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries. The global Linkage model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality, largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 per cent. The analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project model for a sample of 15 countries, and nine stand‐alone national case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty, especially if only the non‐poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.     

Innocent or Not‐so‐innocent Bystanders: Evidence from the Gravity Model of International Trade About the Effects of UN Sanctions on Neighbour Countries

This paper examines two hypotheses about the effects of UN sanctions on trade flows between land neighbours of the target country and the rest of the world. First, there have been claims that sanctions hurt neighbour countries by cutting off trading routes, increasing transportation costs and disrupting established trading ties. We would expect that a neighbour's trade with the rest of the world would fall, as a result. Second, there is extensive evidence that neighbours have been involved in smuggling. Consequently, neighbours should trade more with the rest of the world during UN trade embargoes, because now they also trade on behalf of the target. I employ the gravity model of international trade to show that, overall, a neighbour's trade with the rest of the world tends to fall during UN sanctions episodes. This confirms the first hypothesis above: on a net basis, land neighbours have been ‘innocent bystanders’ hit by UN sanctions.     

Global agricultural trade liberalization: Is Sub-Saharan Africa a gainer or loser?

This paper analyzes the potential impact of agricultural trade liberalization on Sub-Saharan Africa. We used the Agricultural Trade and Policy Simulation Model to estimate the potential effects of agricultural trade liberalization, mainly in the US and EU, on the world-market prices of agricultural commodities. We then used the estimated price changes to assess the impact of these reforms on net-food importers as well as other Sub-Saharan African countries that enjoy preferential trade agreements with the EU and US. The results indicate that the world market prices of all commodities imported by Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to rise while the prices of the key export commodities of the region would either decline or remain unchanged. Given that the prices of major food commodities are expected to rise, net-food-importing countries will experience increasing import bill, thus leading to welfare loss. Major Sub-Saharan Africa sugar exporters who are beneficiaries of preferential agreements such as the EU sugar protocol and US AGOA initiative will become losers as preferences erode due to global liberalization. Thus, the region is expected to generally become a net loser from the current WTO reform modalities.     

我国商业银行中间业务发展水平偏低问题研究

本文用银行间古诺博弈、斯威齐和柠檬市场三个模型,从国有商业银行通过将有较大定价自由的中间业务产品与没有定价权的存贷款产品做成打包产品,以获得事实上的产品定价权的方式实现其规模偏好,中间业务产品市场具有斯威齐模型特征,其他商业银行将会跟随国有商业银行的做法,以及我国商业银行与客户间存在严重的信息不对称导致客户降低消费意愿,分析了我国商业银行中间业务产品发展水平偏低的重要原因.商业银行中间业务产品的成本收益数据及数据包络分析与参数估计得出的经验证据支持了本文的论述.     

能源冲击对中国部门间劳动力市场需求结构的影响

本文在可计算一般均衡(CGE)模型的基础上,结合2007年社会核算矩阵(SAM),模拟了国际能源冲击下中国宏观经济活动以及微观劳动力市场的变动情况,同时具体分析了能源冲击对部门间劳动力市场需求结构的影响和传导机制。研究发现,在面对能源冲击时,不同部门的劳动力需求变化也各不相同,制造业、农林牧渔业等劳动力密集型部门倾向于提供更多的劳动岗位,并且这些岗位主要是面向对能源有较强替代性的技术工人,而其余大部分部门则倾向于缩减劳动岗位的供应;在收入方面,随着能源价格上涨,各类工人收入都会出现不同程度的下降,其中以技术工人降幅最大,产业工人次之,而农业工人的收入在能源价格上涨到一定程度后会出现上升。     

Implications of the US Tax Reform for Transatlantic FDI

On 22 December 2017 President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This corporate tax reform can be considered the most significant amendment of the US corporate tax code since 1986. Besides the reduction of the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act entails features like a switch from worldwide income taxation to territorial taxation, as well as immediate deductions for certain assets. This leads to a substantial improvement for the US in global tax competition. In this paper, we analyse the effects of the US tax reform on FDI flows between Europe and the US. We find that European high-tax countries in particular will suffer from a net outflow of FDI.     

A new approach to financial integration and market income inequality

Using loan contracts of firms in the syndicated loan market, we generate weighted aggregate measures of financial connections of emerging market economies and relate these financial integration indices to income inequality. The results reveal that financial integration is beneficial in reducing market income inequality, but worsens net income inequality. Financial intermediation is detrimental to net income inequality, but beneficial in lowering market income inequality. The results show that independent access to financing has no relationship with income inequality. The results are invariant using alternative income inequality indices and using external instrument against internal instrument in identifying the equations.     

Global monetary policy under a dollar standard

This paper derives an optimal monetary policy in a world with a dollar standard, defined as an environment in which all traded goods prices are set in US dollars, so that exchange rate pass-through into the US price level is zero. We show that the US is essentially indifferent to exchange rate volatility, while the rest of the world places a high weight on exchange rate volatility. In a Nash equilibrium of the monetary policy game, US preferences dominate; the equilibrium is identical to one where the US alone chooses world monetary policy. Despite this, we find surprisingly that the US loses from the dollar's role as an international currency, since the absence of exchange rate pass-through leads to inefficient expenditure allocations within the US. Finally, we derive the conditions for a dollar standard to exist.     

The evolution of syndicated loan markets

This paper provides a historical perspective on the development of the global syndicated loan market, where $2.6 trillion worth of funds were raised in 2004. The emergence of the Eurodollar market in the 1960s, the balance of payments problems of non-oil-exporting emerging countries in the 1970s, the Latin American financial crises and the US merger wave of the 1980s, and finally the competitive financial environment and the emergence of the secondary loan market during the 1990s are reviewed. These have been the most influential financial developments that shaped the syndicated loan markets in the last few decades.     

Payday Loan and Pawnshop Usage: The Impact of Allowing Payday Loan Rollovers

Millions of US households rely on payday loans and pawnshops for short‐term credit. Payday loan interest rates are as high as 25% per 2‐ to 4‐week loans and individuals use a post‐dated check to secure the loan. Pawnshop usage is available for anyone with collateral. This article examines whether individuals using payday loans in states where rollovers are allowed are more likely to also use pawnshops together with payday loans. I find that this is true for individuals who make less than $30,000, but it does not hold for those with higher levels of income. There may be some complementary relationships between payday loan rollovers and pawnshops for these lower‐income individuals. These results are important when considering whether to allow payday loan rollovers.     

Why has the United States continued to receive net investment income as a debtor country?

Why has the United States been able to keep receiving net international investment income as a debtor country? Several authors have pointed out that it is because US direct investments abroad have been generating better returns than have foreign direct investments in the United States. However, there is no consensus on why this is the case. This paper investigates this issue by conducting panel regressions to identify the main determinants of return on US direct investment abroad (RUSDIA) and those of return on foreign direct investment in the United States (RFDIUS), using data from 49 countries over the 1994–2013 period. Our findings suggest that the largest contributor to the RUSDIA‐RFDIUS gap is USDIA's advantage in the internalisation effect, which more than offset any negative age effect. The second largest contributor is income‐shifting activities by US‐controlled MNCs aiming to lower their overall tax payments. The third contributor is the negative age effect of inward FDI in the United States, which more than offset its weak internalisation effect. Altogether, those effects account for about 50% of the average return gap from 1994 to 2013. The contribution of the risk‐compensation hypothesis to the return gap is negligible.     

Families' use of the 1982 tax cut income

The likely allocation of extra income from the 1982 U.S. income lax rate reduction by a group of consumers was investigated. Eighty-five percent of the sample indicated they were likely to spend the additional income and 75% that they would save or invest it. Saving was related to income and age. Those indicating they were likely to save said they would require a larger sum of money as a result of the tax cut in order to make a decision about its use than did those who were most likely to spend it.