Speculative Attacks or Economic Fundamentals: Evidence from the Asian Currency Crisis

This paper argues that what led to the Asian financial crisis was a fatal combination of several self-reinforcing factors including external sector weaknesses, fragility in domestic financial markets due to inadequately administered financial liberalisation, loss of confidence, and short-term capital flows, maturing within less than a year and denominated in unhedged dollars. Some of these factors were country-specific while others were common to the entire region. Asia\u27s financial crisis will almost certainly lead to important changes in the international financial system, as countries try to find an appropriate balance between the benefits from gaining access to intentional capital flows and the potential for instability and ohter risks that also seem to be much greater in a world of large and highly mobile capital movements. The paper discusses important lessons from the crisis

Private Savings in Transition Economies: Are There Terms of Trade Shocks?

Economic agents in the transition economies are subject to tight credit constraints, which are more pronounced during bad state of nature. Thus, adverse shocks to commodity prices in the world market can force them to reduce savings by a larger amount than they would otherwise have. Empirical analysis using a dynamic panel model and data from 21 transition economies confirm that most of the determinants of savings identified in the literature also apply to the transition economies. The transitory component in the terms of trade have a larger positive impact than the permanent component. This reflects the lack of access to foreign borrowing. Although the impact of terms of trade shocks is found to be asymmetric, the magnitude of the impact appears to be small. The results are robust for alternative estimators, determinants and country groupings

Does Exchange Rate Variability Depress Trade Flows ? Evidence From Error Correction Models

This paper examines the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows of the G-7 countries in the context of a multivariate error-correction model. The error-correction models do not show any sign of parameter instability. The results indicate that the exchange rate volatility has a significant negative impact on the volume of exports in each of the G-7 countries. Assuming market participants are risk averse, these results imply that exchange rate uncertainty causes them to reduce their activities, change prices, or shift sources of demand and supply in order to minimize their exposure to the effects of exchange rate volatility. This, in turn, can change the distribution of output across many sectors in these countries. It is quite possible that the surprisingly weak relationship between trade flows and exchange rate volatility reported in several previous studies are due to insufficient attention to the stochastic properties of the relevant time series