Domestic Capital Market Reform and Access to Global Finance: Making Markets Work

Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor sentiment. Equity market liberalizations, on the other hand, have promoted growth in almost every liberalizing country. Yet equity market liberalizations have not had as strong an effect as might be expected. To convince outsiders to invest, countries must put in place laws and supporting institutions to protect the rights of minority shareholders. Countries with such protections tend to have larger, more efficient, and more stable stock markets than those that do not.

Explaining Middle Eastern Authoritarianism

Arab political regimes are both unusually undemocratic and unusually stable. A series of nested statistical models are reported to parse competing explanations. The democratic deficit is comprehensible in terms of lack of modernization, British colonial history, neighborhood effects, reliance on taxes for government finance, and the Arab population share. Interpretation of the last variable is problematic: It could point to some antidemocratic aspect of Arab culture (though this appears not to be supported by survey evidence), or it could be a proxy for some unobservable such as investment in institutions of internal repression that may not be culturally determined and instead reflect elite preferences. Hypotheses that did not receive robust support include the presence of oil rents, the status of women, conflict with Israel or other neighbors, or Islam. The odds on liberalizing transitions occurring are low but rising. In this respect the distinction between the interpretation of the Arab ethnic share as an intrinsic cultural marker and as a proxy for some unobservable is important—if the former is correct, then one would expect the likelihood of regime change to rise only gradually over time, whereas if it is the latter, the probabilities may exhibit much greater temporal variability.democracy, Middle East, Islam, regime change

A Strategic Model of European Gas Supply (GASMOD)

Structural changes in the European natural gas market such as liberalization, increasing demand, and growing import dependency have triggered new attempts to model this market accurately. This paper presents a model of the European natural gas supply, GASMOD, which is structured as a two-stagegame of successive natural gas exports to Europe (upstream market) and wholesale trade within Europe (downstream market), and which explicitly includes infrastructure capacities. We compare three possible market scenarios: Cournot competition on both markets, perfect competition on both markets, and perfect competition on the downstream with Cournot competition on the upstream market. We find that Cournot competition on both markets is the most realistic representation of today's European natural gas market, where suppliers at both stages generate a mark-up at the expense of the final customer (double marginalization). Our results yield a diversified supply portfolio with newly emerging (LNG) exporters gaining market shares. Enforcing perfect competition on the European downstream market would result in positive welfare effects. The limited infrastructure strongly influences the results, and we identify bottlenecks mainly for intra-European trade relations whereas transport capacity on the upstream market is sufficient (with the exception of Norwegian exports) in the Cournot scenario.Natural gas, Strategic behavior, Non-linear optimization, Europe

International Financial Liberalization and Industry Growth

The growth effects of international financial liberalization and integration are investigated using the methodology and data developed by Rajan and Zingales (1998). The main result is that industries highly dependent on external financing do not experience higher growth in value added in countries with liberalized financial markets. Liberalization does, however, increase the growth rates of both production and firm creation among externally dependent industries – given that countries have reached a relatively high level of financial development. These results are consistent both with increased competition and increased outsourcing. Some preliminary evidence point towards the latter explanation.Financial liberalization; Financial integration; Economic growth

Political vs. Currency Premia in International Real Interest Differentials: A Study of Forward Rates for 24 Countries

Different approaches to quantifying the degree of capital mobility for a cross-section of currencies -- particularly saving-investment correlations and tests of real interest parity - have appeared to show a surprisingly low degree of financial market integration. We use a new data set, forward rate data for 24 countries, including many small industrialized countries and seven LDCs, to decompose the real interest differential into two parts: the covered interest differential, or political premium, and the real forward discount, or currency premium. The latter in turn can be decomposed into the exchange risk premium and expected real depreciation. We find a high degree of capital mobility across political boundaries for most of the 011 countries, plus Hong Kong and Singapore, for our sample period of 1982 to 1987. Even for most of the other LDCs and smaller industrialized countries, for which covered interest parity clearly fails, the political premium is not as big a component of the real interest differential as the currency premium. France would appear to have higher capital mobility than most by the criterion of real interest differentials, but is seen in fact to have low capital mobility by the criterion of covered interest differentials, a clear example of the superiority of the latter criterion.

The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt: The Limits of Liberal Political Science and CLS Analysis of Law Elsewhere

On January 25th 2011, following a popular uprising, president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was forced to relinquish power after thirty years of continuous rule. The popular uprising came to be known as the Egyptian revolution of January 25th marking the first time in the modern history of Egypt an authoritarian ruler is forced out of power through the mobilization of Egyptian masses. The popular mobilization came at the heels of several years of “wildcat” workers\u27 strikes affecting various sectors of the economy, public and private, as well as recurring demonstrations spearheaded by the youth of the Egyptian middle class demanding civil and political rights and protesting the intrusive rule of security. This Article discusses the role the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) of Egypt played in framing through its jurisprudence the economic and political picture in the two decades preceding the revolution and that arguably contributed to the precipitation of the events leading up to the revolution

Developing countries and the Uruguay Round : negotiations on services

In the late 1980s many developing countries experienced something of a pardigm shift: governments began to pursue more market-oriented domestic policies. There was an increasing perception that liberalizing access to service markets was a potentially low-cost, effective method for improving the quality and efficiency of domestic service sectors. These unilateral policy developments increased the incentives for developing countries as a group to participate in a multilateral agreement to liberalize trade in services. The author explores the extent to which the initial negotiating positions of developing countries are reflected in the draft General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) that has emerged from the Uruguay Round negotiations. He investigates whether the unilateral policy changes implemented by many developing countries in the late 1980s had a discernible impact on the draft GATS for developing countries. Many developing countries are pursuing regulatory reform and liberalization. To what extent will signing the GATS help governments trying to make their service sectors more efficient? Is the result of the defensive negotiating strategy that was pursued consistent with the shift toward a policy of liberalizing service markets? This issue is of particular relevance insofar as recent liberalization-plus-privatization programs in developing countries were driven by external forces rather than domestic pressure (industry) groups - which might reduce the credibility of liberalization policies. Membership in a binding multilateral agreement could help bolster reform efforts by increasing the costs of backsliding.Trade and Services,Poverty Assessment,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Governance Indicators,Rules of Origin