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Public Debt and Relative Prices in a Cross-Section of Countries
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of debt and distortionary labor taxation on the long-run behavior of the relative price of nontraded goods. At the theoretical level, in a two-sector open economy model we demonstrate that higher public debt, associated with higher taxation, contracts labor supply in both traded and nontraded goods sectors. Relative prices move inversely with relative supply shifts which, in turn, depend on relative factor intensities. At the empirical level, for a panel of advanced economies, we find statistically significant effects of public debt and taxes on the relative price of nontraded goods, with higher debt and taxes associated with higher relative prices.
... In accordance with the Froot-Rogoff effect (Froot and Rogoff, 1991), we include government consumption expenditures as a determinant. 18 Following Galstyan and Velic (2018), government public debt is considered as a potential determinant of the non-tradable relative price. Depending on the relative factor intensity, the effect of government public debt may be positive or negative. ...
... 18 See Galstyan and Lane (2009) and Galstyan and Velic (2018) for empirical applications. ...
This paper investigates the robustness of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect to alternative proxies and to different sectoral classifications between tradable and non-tradable sectors for a panel of 38 developing and emerging economies over the period 1980-2016. We examine the internal and external versions of the BS hypothesis using five different measures. We show that the internal version of the BS hypothesis holds only if the labor productivity differential between the tradable and non-tradable sectors is used rather than the Gross Domestic Product Per worker. Using the mostly conventional sectoral classification between tradable and non-tradable sectors, we also find evidence of a positive effect of the relative price of the non-traded to traded goods on the real exchange rate. Finally, we also show that the previous result is sensitive to the sectoral classification implemented.
This paper examines the persistence of real exchange rates across 151 countries. We employ univariate time series techniques on a country-by-country basis allowing for deterministic structural breaks and nonlinearities in the adjustment process. Our findings suggest that bilateral exchange rates display higher rates of persistence than multilateral exchange rates, with the latter (former) exhibiting half-lives of less than 1 (2) year(s). Assessing country results by stage of economic development, we find that industrial countries display higher levels of exchange rate inertia than developing countries. We retrieve evidence indicating that higher inflation, nominal exchange rate volatility, trade openness and proximity to reference country are associated with faster rates of real exchange rate convergence. Conversely, international financial integration is found to only play a role at the country group level, with differential effects across cohorts.
In this chapter we study the asymptotic distributions for ordinary least squares (OLS), fully modified OLS (FMOLS), and dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimators in cointegrated regression models in panel data. We show that the OLS: FMOLS, and DOLS estimators are all asymptotically normally distributed. However; the asymptotic distribution of the OLS estimator is shown to have a non-zero mean. Monte Carlo results illustrate the sampling behavior of the proposed estimators and show that (I) the OLS estimator has a non-negligible bias in finite samples, (2) the FMOLS estimator does not improve over the OLS estimator in general, and (3) the DOLS outperforms both the OLS and FMOLS estimators.
The IMF Consultative Group on Exchange Rate Issues (CGER) has provided exchange rate assessments for numerous advanced economies from a multilateral perspective. These assessments are additional tools at the disposal of the IMF staff country desks. There are three alternative methodologies have been presented to help gauge the consistency of current balances and real effective exchange rates with underlying fundamentals. The revised and extended methodologies are a "macroeconomic balance approach", a reduced-form "Equilibrium real exchange rate" approach, and an "external sustainability" approach. The former approach calculates the difference between the current account balance projected over the medium term. The second approach directly estimates an equilibrium real exchange rate for each country as a function of medium-term fundamentals, while the latter, calculates the difference between the actual current account balance and the balance that would stabilize the NFA position of the country.
This chapter reviews a number of models of exchange rate developed during the post-Bretton Woods era with special attention to two major strands of models that dominated the literature: the monetary and portfolio balance approaches. The approaches are broken down into categories of nominal and real exchange-rate models, with particular reference to the empirical evidence. The chapter also discusses recent approaches that do not neatly fall into either categorization. Although the underpinnings of these models are quite unsatisfying from the perspective of recent theoretical developments, they remain the workhorses of empirical exchange-rate modeling. Most of the empirical evidence discussed in the chapter comes from reduced form or quasi-reduced form specifications, rather from structural (calibrated) models of economies. Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a particularly simple version of the real exchange rate, where the real exchange rate is assumed to be constant.Controlled Vocabulary Termsexchange-rate modeling; foreign exchange determination; monetary model; nominal exchange rate models; purchasing power parity; real exchange rate
We investigate the link between real exchange rates and sectoral total factor productivity measures for countries in the Eurozone. We show that real exchange rate variation, both in cross-country and time series, closely accords with an amended Balassa-Samuelson interpretation, incorporating shocks both to sectoral productivity and a labor market wedge. We construct a sticky price dynamic general equilibrium model to generate a cross-section and time series of real exchange rates that can be directly compared to the data. Under the assumption of a common currency, estimates from simulated regressions are very similar to the empirical estimates for the Eurozone. Our findings contrast with previous studies that have found little relationship between productivity levels and the real exchange rate among high-income countries, but those studies have included country pairs which have a floating nominal exchange rate.
Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. An important book that will affect policy discussions for a long time to come, This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.
Using 1970–1985 sectoral data for the OECD we find that inflation in nontradable goods exceeds inflation in tradables. We identify a demand shift towards nontradables and faster growth of total factor productivity in the tradable goods sector as the prime causes of the differential inflation. In addition, disinflation attempts and the exchange rate regime appear to have exerted significant influence on the relative inflation rate.
Our goal in this paper is to investigate the relation between government spending and the long-run behaviour of the Irish real exchange rate. We postulate that an increase in government consumption should be associated with real appreciation, while the impact of government investment is ambiguous. Empirically, we find that an increase in government consumption indeed appreciates the real exchange rate while an increase in government investment is associated with real depreciation. Accordingly, the level and composition of government spending matters for Irish external competitiveness.
The relationship between international payments and the real exchange rate-the transfer problem-is a classic question in international economics. We use cross-country data on real exchange rates and a newly constructed data set on countries' net external positions to shed new light on this question. We present a simple theoretical framework that leads to testable implications for the long-run comovements of real exchange rates, net foreign assets, relative GDP and terms of trade, and cross-country and time series evidence on the subject. We show that on average countries with net external liabilities have more depreciated real exchange rates, and that the main channel of transmission seems to be the relative price of nontraded goods, rather than the relative price of traded goods, across countries. Copyright (c) 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper investigates the long- and short-run determinants of the real exchange rate using a panel of data for fourteen OECD countries. The data are analyzed using time series and panel unit root and panel cointegration methods. Two dynamic productivity-based models are used to motivate the empirical exercise. The candidate determinants include productivity levels in the traded and in the nontraded sectors, government spending, the terms of trade, income per capita, and the real price of oil. The empirical results indicate that it is easier to detect cointegration in panel data than in the available time series; moreover, the estimate of the rate of reversion to a cointegrating vector defined by real exchange rates and sectoral productivity differentials is estimated with greater precision as long as homogeneity of parameters is imposed upon the panel. It is more difficult to find evidence for cointegration when allowing for heterogeneity across currencies. The most empirically successful model of the real exchange rate includes sectoral productivity measures in the long run relation and government spending in the short run dynamics.
The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of attention recently, yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment-recognizing that investment may be a poor proxy for the corresponding capital stock. This paper attempts to overcome the data shortage by providing internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund
In this paper we empirically analyze nonlinearities in short-run real exchange rate dynamics. Our findings suggest that real exchange rate misalignments are considerably less persistent and more volatile during times of high debt. Assessing the variance of changes in misalignments, we retrieve evidence indicating that the nominal exchange rate and inflation differentials are more important determinants in states of high debt than in states of low debt. Overall, our results imply that nonlinearities have non-negligible implications for the mechanics of real exchange rate adjustment in emerging markets.
This paper studies how country size affects the role of the exchange rate in external adjustment. First, the impact of country size on the sensitivity of relative prices to external imbalances is explored in a two-country neoclassical model. Second, at the empirical level, a significant effect of external imbalances on relative prices is found. In particular, a trade surplus is associated with a depreciation of the real exchange rate. Our estimations reveal a systematic pattern in the sensitivity of the real exchange rate to external imbalances: larger countries are characterized by a higher absolute trade elasticity of the exchange rate.
We study a newly created panel data set of relative prices for a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries over a 15-year period. The data set includes eurozone members both before and after the inception of the euro, floating exchange rate countries of Western Europe, and emerging market economies of Eastern and Southern Europe. We find that there is a substantial and continuing deviation from purchasing power parity (PPP) at all levels of aggregation, both for traded and non-traded goods, even among eurozone members. Real exchange rates (RER) exhibit two clear properties in the sample (a) they are closely tied to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita relative to the European average, at all levels of aggregation and for both cross country time series variation; (b) they are highly positively correlated with variation in the relative price of non-traded goods. We then construct a simple two-sector endowment economy model of real exchange rate determination which exhibits these two properties, calibrated to match the data. Simulating the model using the historical relative GDP per capita for each country, we find that for most countries, there is a close fit between the actual and simulated real exchange rate. In terms of policy relevance, the model can offer suggestions of the degree to which real exchange rates in Europe (both in and out of the eurozone) have been overvalued (by approximately 15% in Greece and Portugal and 6% in Italy and Spain).
—Martin Berka and Michael B. Devereux
This chapter uses fully modified OLS principles to develop new methods for estimating and testing hypotheses for cointegrating vectors in dynamic panels in a manner that is consistent with the degree of cross sectional heterogeneity that has been permitted in recent panel unit root and panel cointegration studies. The asymptotic properties of various estimators are compared based on pooling along the 'within' and 'between' dimensions of the panel. By using Monte Carlo simulations to study the small sample properties, the group mean estimator is shown to behave well even in relatively small samples under a variety of scenarios.
We show that the composition of government spending influences the long-run behavior of the real exchange rate. We develop a two-sector small open-economy model in which an increase in government consumption is associated with real appreciation, while an increase in government investment may generate real depreciation. Our empirical work confirms that government consumption and government investment have differential effects on the real exchange rate and the relative price of nontradables. Copyright (c) 2009 The Ohio State University.
This article describes the contents and the construction of the EU KLEMS Growth and Productivity Accounts. This database contains industry-level measures of output, inputs and productivity for 25 European countries, Japan and the US for the period from 1970 onwards. The article considers the methodology employed in constructing the database and shows how it can be useful in comparing productivity trends. Although growth accounts are the organising principle, it is argued that the database is useful for a wider range of applications. We give some guidance to prudent use and indicate possible extensions. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2009.
Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa–Samuelson (BS) effect. But looking back 50 years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed to be a universal property is actually quite specific to recent times, emerging a half century ago and growing steadily over time. What might potentially explain this historical pattern? We develop an updated BS model inspired by recent developments in trade theory, where a continuum of goods are differentiated by productivity, and where tradability is endogenously determined. Firms experiencing productivity gains are more likely to become tradable and crowd out firms not experiencing productivity gains. As a result the usual BS assumption—that productivity gains be concentrated in the traded goods sector—emerges endogenously, and the BS effect on relative price levels likewise evolves gradually over time.
One strand of endogenous-growth models assumes constant returns to a broad concept of capital. The author extends these models to include tax-financed government services that affect production or utility. Growth and saving rates fall with an increase in utility-type expenditures; the two rates rise initially with productive government expenditures, but subsequently decline. With an income tax, the decentralized choices of growth and saving are "too low," but if the production function is Cobb-Douglas, the optimizing government still satisfies a natural condition for productive efficiency. Empirical evidence across countries supports some of the hypotheses about government and growth. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.
The assumption that government bonds are perceived as net wealth by the private sector is crucial in demonstrating real effects of shifts in the stock of public debt. In particular, the standard effects of “expansionary” fiscal policy on aggregate demand hinge on this assumption. Government bonds will be perceived as net wealth only if their value exceeds the capitalized value of the implied stream of future tax liabilities. This paper considers the effects on bond values and tax capitalization of finite lives, imperfect private capital markets, a government monopoly in the production of bond “liquidity services,” and uncertainty about future tax obligations. It is shown within the context of an overlapping-generations model that finite lives will not be relevant to the capitalization of future tax liabilities so long as current generations are connected to future generations by a chain of operative intergenerational transfers (either in the direction from old to young or in the direction from young to old). Applications of this result to social security and to other types of imposed intergenerational transfer schemes are also noted. In the presence of imperfect private capital markets, government debt issue will increase net wealth if the government is more efficient, at the margin, than the private market in carrying out the loan process. Similarly, if the government has monopoly power in the production of bond “liquidity services,” then public debt issue will raise net wealth. Finally, the existence of uncertainty with respect to individual future tax liabilities implies that public debt issue may increase the overall risk contained in household balance sheets and thereby effectively re-duce household wealth.
Smooth adjustment to real exchange rate shifts is one of the major challenges facing the Irish economy under EMU. Rather than assume purchasing power parity, the long-run real exchange rate is modelled as time-varying, being determined by relative output levels, the terms of trade and the net foreign asset position. It is shown that these factors account for a large proportion of the long-run movement in the Irish real exchange rate. Copyright 2002 by Taylor and Francis Group
Conventional explanations of the near random walk behavior of real exchange rates rely on near random walk behavior in the underlying fundamentals (e.g.. tastes and technology). The present paper offers an alternative rationale, based on a fixed-factor neoclassical model with traded and non-traded goods. The basic idea is that with open capital markets, agents can smooth their consumption of tradeables in the face of transitory traded goods productivity shocks. Agents cannot smooth non-traded goods productivity shocks, but if these are relatively small (as is often argued to be the case) then traded goods consumption smoothing will lead to smoothing of the intra-temporal price of traded and non-traded goods. The (near) random walk implications of the model for the real exchange rate are in stark contrast to the empirical predictions of the classic Balassa-Samuelson model. The paper applies the model to the yen/dollar exchange rate over the floating rate period.
This argues for a closer link between the modelling of the long-run relations in applied economics and the intertemporal equilibrium notion from economic theory.
We examine the link between the net foreign asset position, the trade balance and the real exchange rate. In particular, we decompose the impact of a country’s net foreign asset position (‘external wealth’) on its long-run real exchange rate into two mechanisms: the relation between external wealth and the trade balance; and, holding fixed other determinants, a negative relation between the trade balance and the real exchange rate. We also provide additional evidence that the relative price of nontradables is an important channel linking the trade balance and the real exchange rate. JEL Classification: F21, F31, F41.
Medium-term determinants of current accounts in industrial and developing countries: An empirical exploration
- M Chinn
- E Prasad
The EMS, the EMU, and the transition to a common currency
- K Froot
- K Rogoff
Real exchange rates and fundamentals: A cross-country perspective
- L Ricci
- G M Milesi-Ferretti
- J Lee
Foundations of international macroeconomics
- M Obstfeld
- K Rogoff