Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the...
Monetary policy affects the real economy through various channels, including the interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset price channels. The credit channel has recently received considerable attention. Small firms are more sensitive to...
This paper estimates the output cost of fighting inflation—the sacrifice ratio—for the South African economy using quarterly data spanning the period 1998Q1–2019Q3. To compute the sacrifice ratio, the structural vector autoregressive model developed...
This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and wealth inequality in South Africa. We employed a unique database of tax administrative data which allowed us to account for individual heterogeneity. These tax data span from 2011 to...
This study considers the implications of alternative monetary policy regimes to deal with a laissez-faire fiscal policy rule, where the government completely spends resource revenue windfall contemporaneously. A three sector dynamic stochastic...
Several countries in Africa – including Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda - have recently discovered large oil and gas or other mineral...
In the last twenty years, Brazil has undergone several attempts of improving sustainable growth through stabilization programmes, and more recently, structural reforms in line with the Washington Consensus Agenda. The results, however, have been...
This study examines the implications of alternative monetary policy regimes to deal with resource revenue shocks when fiscal policy is laissez-faire—that is, when the government spends all resource revenue windfalls contemporaneously. A three-sector...
We consider an overlapping generations model with two production factors and two types of agents in the presence of financial intermediation and its application to the Russian default of August 1998. The paper focuses on the analysis of the...
This paper represents a first attempt to study China’s business cycles using a formal analytical framework, namely, a structural VAR model. It is found that: (a) demand shocks were the dominant source of macroeconomic fluctuations, but supply shocks...
Monetary policy is believed to have a disproportionate effect on firms, depending on their size. Financially constrained firms with limited access to capital markets are expected to be more sensitive to changes in interest rates; this is...
We construct a structural macroeconometric model for member states of the West African Economic and Monetary Union. Fitting this model to annual and quarterly time series data allows us to identify the channels through which macroeconomic innovation...
In this paper we fit a VECM in output and prices to data from ten countries of the CFA Franc Zone. This model allows for various cross-country interactions in both the short run and the long run. The VECM parameters are used to estimate persistence...
This paper examines to what extent the central bank for the West African Economic and Monetary Union (BCEAO) has used interest rate policy in response to domestic economic developments. We show that while in the long run the BCEAO matches changes in...
L’objectif de cet étude est d’analyser l’état de la convergence dans l’UEMOA, de 1980 à 2001, à travers les critères de convergence définis dans son pacte de convergence. On utilise l’approche méthodologique de Haldane et Hall (1991) pour appréhender...
This paper examines whether the BCEAO has made use of the various policy instruments at its disposal for steering credit in the individual CFA zone member countries to complement interest rate policy at the zone level. We estimate whether private...
The paper determines an analytical framework defining the choice of an optimal exchange rate regime for a typical CFA country. The policymakers behave strategically to decide to adopt alternative exchange rate regime by minimizing their loss function...
The West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) has a history of monetary stability and low inflation. Nevertheless, there is substantial variation in relative prices within some UEMOA countries, in particular in the price of food relative to...
In this study, we provide a comprehensive estimation of the contemporary Phillips curve relationship in the South African economy using a novel deep learning technique. Our approach incorporates multiple measures of economic slack/tightness and...
Given the rise in the government debt level in recent times, this paper aims to examine the effect of an increase in government size on risk premium and its transmission in the economy. We jointly identify the term spread shock (originating at the...
In monetary policy communication, every word carries weight. Consider this scenario: the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) articulates its stance to...
Members of the CFA-zone enjoy currency convertibility, fiscal and monetary policies which are more prudent than SSA as a whole, and a large amount of financial and technical assistance. These advantages do not appear, however, to have resulted in...
This Policy Arena examines some of the development challenges faced by SIDS. It brings together a collection of papers arising from the UNU-WIDER project Fragility and Development. These investigations were presented at the UNU-WIDER project meeting...
This Focus is devoted to small islands' development challenges, specifically relating to the achievement of economic growth, and draws on five papers arising from the UNU-WIDER 'Fragility and Development' research project meeting held in Fiji in...
This paper analyses three major problems of the current international monetary system: the asymmetric-adjustment problem, dependence on the monetary policy of the main reserve-issuing country, and the large demand for self-insurance by developing...
Following on WIDER's work on Development Finance which has involved three projects since 2002, a development conference on 'Aid: Principles, Policies and Performance' was organized in June 2006. Aid is one of the most challenging development issues...
Tony Addison 'Birds of a feather flock together', the old saying goes. So too do investors. Today, those investment birds are a depressed lot. The...
The 14-member Franc Zone in West and Central Africa represents the largest monetary union in the southern hemisphere, predating the European Monetary Union by decades. With monetary unions planned for other parts of Africa in the near future...
The volume Institutional Change and Economic Development fills some important gaps in our understanding of the relationship between institutional changes and economic development. It does so by developing new discourses on the 'technology of...
We have now witnessed more than half a decade of relatively heavy capital inflows to a large group of highly heterogeneous developing countries and economies in transition in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Latin America, and parts of...
India’s capital account displays a sharp swing in external financing from official assistance to private capital transfers in the 1990s. This paper examines the implications of this transition for the country. An analysis of the private resource...
This paper analyses the rationale of interventions in foreign exchange markets in Sub- Saharan Africa and reviews exchange rate theory and balance of payments management and its application to African countries. It analyses the liberalization of...
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