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Credit Guarantees: FOGAPE’s Experience In Chile
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This paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital. It is shown that
in the presence of credit markets' imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital, the initial distribution
of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run, as there are multiple steady states.
This paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per-capita output across countries.
Furthermore, the paper shows that cross-country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed,
among other factors, to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries.
The authors analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington, but also from Latin America. Tracing the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms, they document the extensive implementation of Consensus-style reforms in the region as well as the mismatch between reformers expectations and actual outcomes, in terms of growth, poverty reduction, and inequality. They present an assessment of what went wrong with the Washington Consensus-style reform agenda, using a taxonomy of views that put the blame, alternatively, on (i) shortfalls in the implementation of reforms combined with impatience regarding their expected effects; (ii) fundamental flawsin either the design, sequencing, or basic premises of the reform agenda; and (iii) incompleteness of the agenda that left out crucial reform needs, such as volatility, technological innovation, institutional change and inequality.
This paper surveys the empirical literature examining bank privatization. We begin by documenting the extent of, theoretical rationale for, and measured performance of state-owned banks around the world, and then assess why many governments have chosen to privatize their often very large state owned banking sectors. The empirical evidence clearly shows that state owned banks are far less efficient than privately owned banks, and that state domination of banking imposes increasingly severe penalties on those countries with the largest state banking sectors. On the other hand, there is little in the empirical record to suggest that privatization alone transforms the efficiency of divested banks, especially when these are only partially privatized. Privatization generally improves performance, but by far less than is typically observed in studies of non-financial industries. An increasingly common outcome of large-scale bank privatization programs is foreign ownership of many nations' banking sector, which evidence suggests is usually positive in an economic sense, but problematic politically.
We examine how political, institutional, and economic factors are related to a country's decision to privatize state-owned banks. Using a comprehensive panel of 101 countries from 1982 to 2000, we find that the determinants of this decision differ markedly between OECD and non-OECD nations. Political factors significantly affect the likelihood of bank privatization only in developing countries. Specifically, in non-OECD countries, a bank privatization is more likely the more accountable the government is to its people. In contrast, none of our political variables affects the bank privatization decision in developed countries. Economic factors (such as the quality of the nation's banking sector) are significant determinants of bank privatization in both OECD and non-OECD nations.
Government-driven credit had an important role in countervailing private credit crunch in Brazil during the recent financial crisis. However, government credit concessions continued to expand after the economy recovered. This paper investigates some important features of this expansion using a huge repository of loan contracts between banks and firms, composing an unbalanced panel of almost 1 million firms between 2004 and 2012. We show that earmarked funds have been particularly important for sectors intensive in positive social externalities. However, those sectors were not the main beneficiaries of the strong expansion in earmarked credit observed since the crisis. Our results also show that larger, older and less risky firms have benefited most from the government sponsored credit expansion. Additionally, although a higher access to earmarked credit tends to lead to higher leverage, the effect on investment appears to be insignificant for publicly traded firms. Since interest rates on earmarked loans are lower than the market interest rates, firms with higher access to this type of loan tend to lower cost of debt