What Makes Currencies Volatile? An Empirical Investigation

Real effective exchange rate volatility is examined for 90 countries using monthly data from January 1990 to June 2006. Volatility decreases with openness to international trade and per capita GDP, and increases with inflation, particularly under a horizontal peg or band, and with terms-of-trade volatility. The choice of exchange rate regime matters. After controlling for these effects, an independent float adds at least 45% to the standard deviation of the real effective exchange rate, relative to a conventional peg, but most other regimes make little difference. The results are robust to alternative volatility measures and to sample selection bias.     

Impact of Global Financial Crises on the Indonesian Economy： An Input-Output Analysis

The debt crisis in the European Union （EU） and the U.S. has significant potential impact on the economy of Indonesia. U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008 has a strong impact on Indonesian economy, that Indonesia＇s gross domestic product （GDP） slowed down to below 5% during 2009. Until October 2012, Indonesia＇s export growth is starting to grow negatively on some sectors when the crises in the EU and the U.S. have started or overall grew by -6%. Although the slowdown does not occur in all sectors, the impact spreads to other sectors as the existence of industrial linkage among sectors. The objective of the study is to look at the impact on the sector level on various indicators such as GDP （value added） and employment. Input-output analysis will be used in the simulation. Indonesia input-output table of 2005 is applied as the data base. The simulation results show that if exports decline occurs in the U.S., the economic growth will be -0.20%. Meanwhile, if it occurs in the EU, the growth of GDP will be -0.24%. If some Asian countries face the fall of demand of Indonesian export, GDP growth declines by 0.61%. The fall of exports demand from some Asian countries, EU countries and the U.S. will cause the GDP growth by -1.06%. The crisis occurring in both the US and the EU has decreased export demand from those countries and region including some Asian countries. The impact to employment seemed to be minimal, only -0.47% of total labour force.     

What are the Trade Spill-Overs from Fiscal Shocks in Europe? An Empirical Analysis***

We use a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) analysis to explore the (trade spill-over) effects of fiscal policy shocks in Europe. To enhance comparability with the existing literature, we first analyse the effects of these shocks at the national level. Here, we employ identification based on Choleski decomposition and a structural VAR, both of which lead to the same results. Then, we turn to study the cross-border spill-overs of fiscal shocks via the trade channel. Fiscal expansions in Germany, France and Italy lead to significant increases in imports from a number of European countries. In order to mimic the case of monetary union, we also shut off the effects via the short-term interest rate and the nominal exchange rate and find a slight strengthening on average of the cross-country spill-overs from a fiscal expansion. These results suggest that it may be worthwhile to further investigate the possibility of enhanced fiscal coordination.*** This research is part of the RTN project ‘Macroeconomic Policy Design for Monetary Unions’, funded by the European Commission (contract number HPRN-CT-2002-00237). We thank two anonymous referees, a referee for the ECB Working Paper series, Peter Claeys, David-Jan Jansen, Franc Klaassen, Roberto Perotti and audiences at the Dutch Central Bank and the CEPR/CREI Conference ‘Designing a Macroeconomic Policy Framework for Europe’ (Barcelona, 2004) for many helpful comments. A large part of this paper was written while Beetsma was visiting the Directorate-General for Research of the ECB. He thanks the ECB for the stimulating research environment. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not commit any of.cial institution. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Banking and Debt Crises in Europe: The Dangerous Liaisons?

The potential mutation of the Sub-Prime banking crisis into a sovereign debt one in Euro area countries is investigated. After reviewing the criteria used to measure the debt vulnerability, the balance sheet approach is presented in order to illustrate the potential connections between these two types of crises. A graphical analysis yields evidence that at the end 2009 the probability of observing a Euro area country defaulting is less likely than six month before. Nevertheless, the serious threats, which concern Greece and Ireland, do not permit us to exclude the occurrence of a contagious, or self-fulfilling, sovereign debt or currency crises in Euro area in the future.