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What Did You Do in the Currency Wars? (Part I)
Tony Addison The present currency turmoil is both a symptom and a cause of profound changes now underway in the global economy. In part 1 of this two...
146 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
Surprises Ahead?
Tony Addison With six months remaining till the end of 2011, it’s time to take a peek into the near future. What can we expect? John Kenneth Galbraith...
Journal Special Issue
Development AidFollowing 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...
Blog
Animal Spirits
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...
Journal Special Issue
The CFA Franc Zone 10 Years After DevaluationMembers 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...
Journal Special Issue
Policy Arena: Small Island Developing StatesThis 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...
Journal Special Issue
FocusThis 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...
Working Paper
The Provision of Global LiquidityThis 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...
Working Paper
Russian Transition - Chinese ReformsThe paper compares the Russian transition with the Chinese reforms. The concept and implications of 'transition' differ from those of 'reform'. Transition in its systemic understanding is considered as a change of the system, a shift to a new one...
Policy Brief
What Can the European Central Bank Learn from Africa?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...
Book Chapter
The provision of global liquidity: the global reserve systemPart of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
Policy Brief
Stranger than Fiction? Understanding Institutional Changes and Economic DevelopmentThe 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...
Blog
The Euro's Impact on the Developing and Transition Economies
by Charles Wyplosz With all the hype in Europe and on financial markets worldwide, what does the birth of the euro mean for the developing and...
Blog
Apres La Chute: The CFA Franc Zone 1994-2003
by David FieldingMonetary Union in AfricaIn the last ten years, there has been much debate about the economic impact of monetary union, in which...
Research Brief
Responding to Aid-Induced Dutch DiseaseIn the WIDER Working Paper 'Aid and the Fiscal and Monetary Responses to Dutch Disease' Alan Roe looks at the ways in which aid-induced, and mineral export-induced Dutch Disease (DD) are similar, and the ways in which they differ. He argues that many...
Journal Article
The Macroeconomic Management of Increased AidPart of Journal Special Issue Development Aid
Journal Article
Monetary Policy Rules for Managing Aid Surges in AfricaPart of Journal Special Issue Development Aid
Blog
From the Editor’s Desk (February 2015)
February found UNU-WIDER busy sending out Calls for Papers on topics ranging from social protection to clean energy to discrimination and affirmative...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (March 2015)
I’m writing this editorial from Dar es Salaam, while at the 20th anniversary workshop for Tanzania’s REPOA, one of our research partners. UNU-WIDER...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (April 2015)
So we have reached April. The year is starting to move fast. I’m writing this from New York, having just participated in an event on the sustainable...
Blog
From the Editor’s Desk (June-August 2015)
And so we come to the summer Angle. We have just passed the longest day (midsummer) in Helsinki, with 19 or so hours of daylight. The seagulls nesting...
Blog
Development Finance: The Role for Aid in Africa
Aid’s future, its history, and its impact were the topics of a policy workshop held by UNU-WIDER in co-operation with the Embassy of Denmark in Dar es...
Book
Institutional Change and Economic DevelopmentThe issue of institutional development has come to prominence during the last decade or so. During this period, even the IMF and the World Bank, which used to treat institutions as mere 'details', have come to emphasize the role of institutions in...
Book Chapter
The Macroeconomic Repercussions of Agricultural Shocks and their Implications for InsurancePart of Book Insurance Against Poverty
Book Chapter
Factor Shares and Resource BoomsPart of Book Inequality, Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalization and Globalization
Journal Special Issue
Aid Policy and the Macroeconomic Management of AidThis is an introduction to the UNU-WIDER special issue of World Development on aid policy and the macroeconomic management of aid. We provide an overview of the 10 studies, grouping them under three sub-themes: the aid–growth relationship; the supply...
Working Paper
Country Study 6Three major phases of economic policy can be distinguished between 1980 and 1985: from 1980 to 1982, when the government reacted to deteriorating external conditions (the debt crisis and world recession) by liberalizing imports, relaxing fiscal...
Working Paper
Country Study 17Tanzania has not yet successfully had an IMF standby arrangement that ran its course, although several programmes have been implemented at various points in time. These programmes combined demand restraint and structural adjustment with the help of...
Working Paper
Country Study 13India's first two bouts of orthodox stabilization policy following independence were quite different. The first, prompted by a prolonged drought at home and the wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965, was relatively mild in form. The rupee was...
Working Paper
Country Study 12Argentina has had successive stabs at stabilization since the mid-1970s. Throughout most of this time it has had to wrestle with acute problems of hyperinflation, capital flight, rising external debt, a stop-go pattern of output, and for a long time...
Working Paper
Country Study 11Brazil has undergone three stabilization programmes since 1980: without the IMF in 1981-82; with the IMF in 1983-84, and the Cruzado Plan of 1986. The first two could be said to have been more orthodox in character, given the political and social...
Working Paper
Aid and the Fiscal and Monetary Responses to Dutch DiseaseThis study assesses the fiscal and monetary management challenges that can be associated with large inflows of foreign aid. It provides a brief overview of the literature on Dutch Disease (DD) as applied to mineral wealth and then assesses the...
Journal Article
The Behavior of Interest Rate Differentials under Shifting Exchange Rate RegimesPart of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
Journal Article
El Tramo Corto de la Estructura a Plazo como Predictor de Expectativas de la Actividad Económica en ColombiaPart of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
Book Chapter
Capital Flows to Developing Countries and the Reform of the International Financial SystemPart of Book Governing Globalization
Book Chapter
Are World Financial Markets More Open?Part of Book Financial Openness and National Autonomy
Book Chapter
Exchange Controls and Policy AutonomyPart of Book Financial Openness and National Autonomy
Book Chapter
Causes and Lessons of the Mexican Peso CrisisPart of Book Short-Term Capital Flows and Economic Crises
Book Chapter
Will the Euro Trigger More Monetary Unions in Africa?Part of Book The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries
Book Chapter
Estimating an Interest Rate Reaction Function for the BCEAOPart of Book Macroeconomic Policy in the Franc Zone
Book Chapter
The Characteristics of Macroeconomic Shocks in the Franc ZonePart of Book Macroeconomic Policy in the Franc Zone
Book Chapter
Analysis of the Convergence Process in the UEMOA ZonePart of Book Macroeconomic Policy in the Franc Zone
Book Chapter
How Does Monetary Policy Affect the Poor?Part of Book Macroeconomic Policy in the Franc Zone
Book Chapter
Transition from ODA to Private Capital FlowsPart of Book Development Finance in the Global Economy
Book Chapter
Will the Emergence of the Euro Affect World Commodity Prices?Part of Book The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries
Journal Article
How Does Monetary Policy Affect the Poor?Part of Journal Special Issue The CFA Franc Zone 10 Years After Devaluation
Journal Article
What Determines Monetary Policy in the Franc Zone?Part of Journal Special Issue The CFA Franc Zone 10 Years After Devaluation
Working Paper
Government size and risk premiumGiven 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...
Blog
Analysing monetary policy communication in South Africa
In monetary policy communication, every word carries weight. Consider this scenario: the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) articulates its stance to...
Working Paper
Debt-financed fiscal stimulus in South AfricaDebt-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...
Working Paper
A deep learning approach to estimation of the Phillips curve in South AfricaIn 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...
Research Brief
Monetary policy and firm size in South AfricaMonetary 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...
Working Paper
Structural estimates of the South African sacrifice ratioThis 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...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and wealth inequality in South AfricaThis 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...
Working Paper
Monetary policy in South Africa, 2007–21This paper reviews South Africa’s monetary policy since 2007 and makes recommendations towards improving the inflation-targeting framework currently in place. Following a surge in inflation into double digits in 2007/08, the South African Reserve...
Working Paper
Wage inequality under inflation-targeting in South AfricaThis paper aims at providing new evidence over the effect of conventional monetary policy shocks on wage inequality through the earnings heterogeneity channel under the inflation-targeting regime implemented in South Africa since 2000.The empirical...
Working Paper
The Transition from Official Aid to Private Capital FlowsIndia’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...
Working Paper
Interdependencies between Monetary Policy and Foreign Exchange Intervention under Inflation TargetingThe bulk of recent literature on foreign exchange interventions has overlooked the potential interdependencies that may exist between these operations and the conduct of monetary policy. This is the case even under inflation targeting and especially...
Working Paper
How Optimal are the Extremes?During the Asian crisis, intermediate exchange rate regimes vanished. It has been argued that those regimes were no longer useful and only the extremes remained valid. The paper analyses three foreign exchange regimes: Argentina (pegged), Chile (band...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Management of Increased AidThis paper investigates the macroeconomic challenges created by a surge in aid inflows. It develops an analytical framework for examining possible policy responses to increased aid, in terms of absorption and spending of aid—where the central bank...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Rules for Managing Aid Surges in AfricaWe examine the properties of alternative monetary policy rules in response to large aid surges in low-income countries characterized by incomplete capital market integration and currency substitution. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium...
Blog
Will Norway’s model of Sovereign Wealth Fund work in Tanzania?: A reality check
Several countries in Africa – including Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda - have recently discovered large oil and gas or other mineral...
Working Paper
Do Structural Reforms always Succeed?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...
Journal Article
Monetary policy options for managing resource revenue shocks when fiscal policy is laissez-faireThis 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...
Working Paper
Financial Sector Structure and Financial Crisis BurdenWe 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...
Working Paper
China's Business CyclesThis 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...
Working Paper
The size distribution of monetary policy effects among South African manufacturing firmsMonetary 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...
Working Paper
The information content of the yield spread about future inflation in South AfricaThe proposition that inflation expectations can be extracted as inflation predictions from the government bond yield curve has been tested, with partially positive results, using data from the United States and European countries. Despite the...
Working Paper
Evaluating monetary policy options for managing resource revenue shocks when fiscal policy is laissez-faireThis 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...
Working Paper
Countercyclical Fiscal PolicyFor many emerging market economies, over reliance on monetary policy may bring worse macro results, when compared to a more balanced framework of countercyclical fiscal and monetary policy. The use of countercyclical fiscal policy requires as a...
Working Paper
Financial Regulation and Supervision in Emerging MarketsThe paper deals with changes in the regulation and supervision of the Latin American financial sector in the aftermath of the ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994–95. While it finds that both have improved, regulation and supervision cannot resolve all problems...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Repercussions of Agricultural Shocks and their Implications for InsuranceThe paper considers the macroeconomic impact of shocks to agricultural output and of negative and positive price shocks. It is shown that negative price shocks have particularly large externalities: it is estimated that the overall impact of these...
Working Paper
The Liberalization of Foreign Exchange Markets and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan AfricaThis 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...
Working Paper
Factor Shares and Resource BoomsThis paper studies the evolution of Venezuelan inequality since 1970. It finds a striking increase in Venezuelan inequality that has been due mainly to the rise in capital's share of GDP. It shows that the increase can be traced back to the coupling...
Working Paper
Capital Flows to Developing Countries of the International Financial SystemRecent financial crises, whose effects have been particularly severe in developing countries, have led to a wide-ranging debate on international financial reform. This debate has had to confront the implications of the huge growth of international...
Working Paper
Modelling Macroeconomic Linkages in a Monetary UnionWe 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...
Working Paper
The Characteristics of Macroeconomic Shocks in the CFA Franc ZoneIn 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...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy in the Franc ZoneThis 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...
Working Paper
Analyse du Processus de Convergence Dans la Zone UEMOAL’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...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy in the CFA ZoneThis 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...
Working Paper
The Costs and Benefits Analysis of CFA MembershipThe 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...
Displaying 96 of 146 results