Renminbi in Ordinary Economies: A Demand‐side Study of Currency Globalization

Most studies of renminbi internationalization focus on the supply side, by examining China's own economic and political conditions. In contrast, this study addresses the demand side of renminbi internationalization, by providing an in‐depth analysis of renminbi use in ordinary foreign economies from both economic and political perspectives, with a particular focus on South Korea, China's next‐door neighbor. The study finds that sustainable indigenous market forces facilitating renminbi use in South Korea remain weak, despite the country's close economic ties with China. This research also shows, however, that the Korean Government has itself recently been able, through its policy measures, to generate new domestic support for greater use of the renminbi. These findings ultimately highlight the significant impact on the internationalization of a currency of the politics in the foreign countries using it.     

Overall and time-varying effects of global and domestic uncertainty on the Korean economy

This study analyzes the overall and time-varying effects of global and domestic uncertainty on the Korean economy by estimating constant parameter and time-varying parameter vector autoregressive models. Global and Korea-specific uncertainty are measured using the method proposed by Mumtaz and Theodoridis (2017). A rise in both the uncertainty measures has an adverse impact on the Korean economy by lowering stock market returns and output growth, and by creating inflation caused by currency depreciation. Quantitatively, the domestic uncertainty shock exercises a larger effect on the Korean economy than the global uncertainty shock, as the former uncertainty shock accounts for about one-fifth of output variation and the latter accounts for about one-tenth. Regarding time-varying effects, substantial increases in domestic uncertainty during the Asian Financial Crisis and global uncertainty during the Global Financial Crisis explain a significant part of macroeconomic fluctuations in Korea during those periods. This is because of the increased volatility of uncertainty shocks during these periods, rather than a structural change in the way these shocks affect the economy.     

The political economy of income distribution in South Korea: The impact of the state's industrialization policies

A number of previous studies of economic growth and income distribution in South Korea, based largely on 1960s data, concluded that South Korea was an exception to Kuznets' ‘inverse U-pattern’ of income inequality. Also, it was regarded as an exception to the usual negative consequences predicted by dependency theory for an economy so dependent on foreign capital and world markets. This author presents more recent data — for the 1970s and early 1980s — in order to support his claim that the trend toward income equality that appeared in the 1960s was reversed in the 1970s. The author develops a thesis that stresses the role of the state in shaping the Korean political economy. He argues that it has been the strong South Korean developmentalist state in firm control of both domestic and foreign capital and its export-oriented industrialization policies that have been the principal determinant of the pattern of income distribution. He contests the usual explanation related to the level of economic development or external dependency per se.     

Intranational Consumption Risk Sharing in South Korea: 2000–2016

This paper examines consumption risk sharing among 16 regions in South Korea over the 2000–2016 period. The empirical results show that 91.8 percent of shocks to gross regional domestic product are smoothed in South Korea. Capital markets, the tax‐transfer system and credit markets absorb 29.9, 28.9 and 33.0 percent of shocks to gross regional domestic product, respectively. Most notably, South Korea relies more on credit markets for risk sharing than capital markets, an opposite pattern to advanced countries like the USA, Canada and Australia. Furthermore, the patterns of consumption risk sharing are different before and after the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, and differences in regional industrial structure and local development can influence these patterns. This paper attempts to infer the connection between these findings and both the rapid economic growth of South Korea and the Asian and global financial crises.     

Macroeconomic effects of uncertainty shocks: Evidence from Korea

This paper proposes a new measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) for Korea by fine-tuning the keywords and exploiting information drawn from a wide variety of local newspapers. The uniqueness of our new EPU index lies mainly in the fact that it uses a set of keywords that correspond much more closely to actual language use and better reflect the economic environment of Korea, which is classified as a small open economy. After shocks to EPU being identified, we employ these shocks to estimate the impulse responses using local projections. Unlike the existing measure, our results show that shocks to EPU lead to a significant decline in macroeconomic aggregates such as output, consumption, investment, and employment. Thus our results suggest a refinement of the EPU index in general for other countries accordingly. We also develop policy-specific uncertainty indices and show that they capture important historical events related to the corresponding policies, such as monetary and fiscal measures.     

Relationship regarding the demand for labor between domestic temporary and foreign workers: Korean case

With the progress of globalization, South Korea, one of the emerging industrial countries, has recently witnessed a sharp increase in the number of enterprises that employ foreigners. However, there are only a limited number of studies on the influence that such an increase has had on the labor market in the Republic of Korea. Thus, using ‘Workplace Panel Survey’ data surveyed by the Korea Labor Institute (KLI), this paper examines the relationship concerning the labor demand of an establishment between domestic temporary and foreign workers. Analysis using a bivariate Tobit model shows that a typical Korean firm attempts to employ domestic temporary and foreign workers simultaneously. Further, the empirical analysis found that any establishment that is relatively newly established and has difficulty in recruiting domestic workers hires foreign workers, but there is no evidence that establishments hire foreign workers rather than domestic temporary workers to save on the production cost.     

韩国“建设新乡村运动”刍议

"建设新乡村运动"是农民致富政策的基本实践形式,是韩国经济政策的支柱之一。"建设新乡村运动"加速了韩国新农村建设和城乡一体化进程,极大地推动了农业现代化,全面奠定了韩国经济腾飞的基础。     

Northern policy and Japan: North Korea‐Japan normalization negotiations and Japanese policy towards North Korea

This paper seeks to examine the reality of the North Korea‐Japan negotiations, which have continued intermittently for more than 13 years since Kanemaru's visit to North Korea. It also analyzes Japanese foreign policy toward the North during the normalization negotiations at both international and domestic levels, and studies the effect that the normalization of relations of the two neighbor states will have on the Korean peninsula. To conclude, it argues that Japan's engagement policy would be expected to contribute to the stability and peace of the Korean peninsula and East Asia.     

浅析杜鲁门政府时期美国对远东地区的战略转变

冷战迫使美国重新分析日本在美国全球战略中的地位.美国对日本政策的调整带动了美国对韩国政策的调整,即收缩在韩国的军事力量,回避直接介入朝鲜半岛,主要通过政治、经济援助来稳定韩国的局势.美日韩三国同盟明显体现了“分工理论”.     

The role for competition policy in economic development: the South African experience

Competition policy is part of the new international orthodoxy in economic policy and, at the same time, was viewed in South Africa as a crucial element of economic transformation. This article reviews the role of competition policy in economic development and the experiences of developing countries such as Brazil and South Korea. It then assesses the effects of competition policy in South Africa after 1994, with the main focus being on the performance of the new competition institutions established in 1999. The case of the steel industry is used to assess the approach and impact of the institutions in a concentrated sector that has simultaneously undergone processes of liberalisation and domestic consolidation.     

Do Capital Inflows Matter to Asset Prices? The Case of Korea*

In the present paper, we investigate whether capital flows induce domestic asset price hikes in the case of Korea. This issue is relevant for crisis‐hit economies trying to prevent a boom–bust cycle as well as in the formulation of macroeconomic policy objectives in emerging market economies. Korea has recently experienced large capital inflows, in particular a surge in portfolio inflows. Furthermore, asset prices, including stock prices, land prices and nominal and real exchange rates, have also appreciated. The empirical results, obtained using a vector autoregression model, suggest that capital inflow shocks have caused stock prices but not land prices to increase. The effects on the nominal and real exchange rates have been limited, which relates to the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves.     

The effect of North Korean threats on financial markets in South Korea and Japan

This paper examines the effects of North Korean threats, as measured by the proprietary North Korean Threat Index (NKTI), on financial markets in South Korea and Japan. We examine the effects of the threats on stock markets, foreign exchange markets, and overnight interest rates. We consider causality in mean and variance tests to determine any link between the NKTI and financial variables. The causality-in-mean test results indicate the presence of a causal link running from North Korean threats to stock returns and exchange rate returns in both countries, but no significant link to the overnight interest rate in either country. The causality-in-variance test results indicate no significant impact emanating from North Korean threats. Integrating the North Korean economy into the global economy stands to eliminate these threats and thus to contribute to regional financial stability.     

Macroeconomic Uncertainty in South Africa

This paper develops a new index of economic uncertainty for South Africa for the period 1990–2014. The index is constructed from three sources: (1 ) Disagreement among professional forecasters, (2 ) a count of international and local newspaper articles discussing economic uncertainty in South Africa and (3 ) mentions of uncertainty in the quarterly economic review of the South African Reserve Bank. The index shows high levels of uncertainty around the period of democratic transition in 1992–1994, the large depreciation of the currency in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008. The uncertainty index is a leading indicator of a recession. An unanticipated increase in the index is associated with a fall in GDP, investment, industrial production and private sector employment. Contrary to evidence for the U.S.A and the U.K., uncertainty shocks are inflationary. These results are robust to controlling for global uncertainty shocks, consumer confidence and financial shocks.     

Which external shock matters in small open economies? Global risk aversion vs. US economic policy uncertainty

We investigate the roles of global risk aversion and US economic policy uncertainty in contributing to financial and macroeconomic fluctuations in small open economies (SOEs). We use a panel of forty SOEs that includes both advanced economies (AEs) and emerging markets economies (EMEs) to find that SOEs’ financial and economic activities exhibit relatively short-lived and robust reactions to risk aversion shocks, while responding smoothly and persistently to US policy uncertainty shocks, consistent with Bloom et al. (2018). A novel finding of this paper is that the responses of AEs and EMEs are asymmetric: AEs react more strongly to US policy uncertainty shocks while EMEs are more sensitive to risk aversion shocks. These results suggest that the channels through which each shock is transmitted to SOEs may vary.     

A Third World perspective on industrial decentralization: The World Bank Study on Seoul

Over the past five years the World Bank has been engaged in an extensive investigation of the implementation of policies designed to recast the urban system of South Korea and, more especially, to constrain the expansion of the capital city, Seoul. The South Korean situation furnishes an example of an active employment decentralization policy pursued in a middle‐income developing country. The task of the paper is to synthesize the extant research material on Seoul, chronicling the unfolding nature of policy intervention, the directions of industrial policy in South Korea and suggesting the broader implications for decentralization planning in South Africa.     

Do Monetary Policy Announcements Affect Exchange Rate Returns and Volatility of Returns? Some Evidence from High‐Frequency Intra‐Day South African Data

This paper examines the temporal effect of domestic monetary policy surprises on both returns and volatility of returns of the South African rand/U.S. dollar exchange rate. The analysis in this “event study” proceeds using intra‐day minute‐by‐minute exchange rate data, repo rate data from the South African Reserve Bank's scheduled monetary policy announcements, and market consensus repo rate forecasts. A carefully selected sample over the period August 2003 to November 2017 ensures that the change in monetary policy is exogenous to the exchange rate. We find statistically and economically significant responses in intra‐day high‐frequency South African rand/U.S. dollar exchange rate returns and volatility of exchange rate returns to domestic interest rate surprises, but anticipated changes have no bearing on exchange rate returns and their volatility. The empirical results also indicate that there is an instantaneous response of the rand/dollar exchange rate to monetary policy surprises and that monetary policy news is an important determinant of the exchange rate until at least 42 minutes after the pronouncement – suggesting a high degree of market “efficiency” in its mechanical sense (although not necessarily in the deeper economic‐informational sense) in processing this information. Essentially, the asymmetric GARCH results exhibit no leverage effects – positive and negative information shocks have symmetric effects on conditional variance.     

Uncertainty and the Great Slump†

This article investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the British interwar economy. The first type of evidence examined is qualitative. The historical record shows that contemporaries regularly reported the incidence and consequences of major uncertainty shocks. The second type of evidence analysed is quantitative. Based on a new index of economic policy uncertainty constructed from newspapers and vector autoregressions, the results suggest that uncertainty was an important source of economic fluctuations in Britain between the wars.     

Performance of Domestic and Foreign Banks: The Case of Korea and the Asian Financial Crisis

Abstract

This paper examines the performance of banks, domestic and foreign, in Korea before and after the Asian financial crisis, examining how the profitability of those banks differed and identifying factors that explain why those differences existed. The performance of Korean banks deteriorated dramatically in 1998 with most banks recovering somewhat in 1999. Foreign banks did not experience the same negative effect on their performance as a rule. Overall, the domestic Korean banks suffered more severely from the Asian financial crisis than foreign banks. Several possible explanations exist. First, foreign banks, unlike domestic Korean banks, were not subject to credit allocation directives from the Korean government to selected, favoured industries. Second, foreign banks, since they relied for governance on the mother bank in the home country, achieved higher efficiency and better asset and liability management. Finally, foreign banks rely more heavily on fee-for-service income rather than loan revenue.     

An Investigation of the Effects of Prices and Exchange Rates on Trade Flows in East Asia

This paper investigates the dynamic response of imports and exports to changes in domestic prices, foreign prices and real effective exchange rates for Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. A vector autoregressive model and cointegration analysis are used to study the long-run relationships and the short-run dynamics of these variables. The vector error-correction model indicates that in almost all cases, domestic and foreign prices have a larger impact on the trade flows than the real effective exchange rates. We cannot find any significant difference in the response time of import demand to shocks in prices and exchange rates; however, the response time for export supply varies among countries.     

The Impact of US Uncertainty Shocks on Small Open Economies

In this paper, we investigate the impact of US uncertainty shocks on GDP growth in nine small open economies: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We compare the impact of two types of shocks: i) stock market volatility shocks and ii) policy uncertainty shocks. Using quarterly data from 1986Q1 to 2016Q1, this issue is analysed using Bayesian VAR models. Our results suggest that policy uncertainty seems to matter more than stock market volatility. Stock market volatility shocks appear to robustly have significant effects on Danish GDP growth. Policy uncertainty shocks, on the other hand, reliably lowers GDP growth in all five Nordic countries in a statistically significant manner. Statistically significant effects of policy uncertainty shocks on the Anglo-Saxon countries in our sample are harder to establish and are, in our preferred specification, only found for the United Kingdom.