Financing the transition: Risks and benefits of integrating into the international capital market

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical evidence on capital account convertibility and assesses its relevance for the reform states of Central and Eastern Europe. Its major findings are that domestic investment conditions matter and that domestic policies can reduce the risk of an abrupt reversal of capital flows. Policymakers must stand ready to adjust the exchange rate but also their fiscal and monetary policies once signs of overheating appear. The effectiveness of controls on capital flows is highly questionable. Moreover, capital controls raise the irreversibility of investment projects and may cause the postponement of investment decisions. The countries under review have made substantial progress towards capital account convertibility and should continue on this track as they strive for membership in the EU.

European financial integration and corporate governance

The paper studies the link between the integration of European financial markets and corporate governance in Europe. The focus of the paper is on how integration affects the interplay of ownership structures, capital structures, and monitoring, all of which can be used to govern agency problems at the firm level. Integration is a process which comprises the abolition of capital controls, the harmonization of institutions, and the creation of a common currency area. These elements, in turn, affect the liquidity of markets, the cost of monitoring, and the cost of debt. Based on these considerations, implications for changes in the structure of corporate governance systems are derived. --corporate governance,complementarity,financial integration

The end of the Czech miracle? Currency crisis reveals need for institutional reforms

After years of high growth, low unemployment and low inflation, the Czech economy has suffered a sudden setback. Speculative attacks on the currency have forced the Central Bank to abandon its fixed exchange rate. The government has now announced austerity measures to reduce the massive current account deficit. In the short run, these measures will lead to lower growth and higher unemployment. Moreover, the devaluation of the Czech Koruna will make it more difficult to further reduce inflation. The crisis is due in part to the previous boom in domestic absorption. The expansion of absorption has been fuelled by massive capital inflows which helped to maintain the fixed exchange rate. At the same time, productivity growth has been sluggish despite high investment-to-GDP ratios, and wages have increased substantially despite sluggish productivity growth. These developments have contributed to the overvaluation of the exchange rate. As a result, the competitiveness of the tradables sector has been weakened, and the current account deficit has widened dramatically. The policy measures now announced aim at reducing domestic demand by cutting fiscal expenditure, raising taxes, devaluing the currency, and containing wage growth in the public sector. However, the government has so far failed to address the microeconomic issues that are at the heart of these supply-side problems. These include inefficiencies in financial intermediation, ineffective bankruptcy procedures, and weaknesses in the corporate governance of enterprises resulting from mass privatization. Solutions to the problems in the banking and financial sector should comprise tax incentives for banks to provision for loan losses, decentralized debt restructuring, the streamlining of bankruptcy proceedings, upgrading of the court system's resources, and a greater political will to enforce the existing bankruptcy legislation. Opening up for foreign banks more decisively and in particular allowing foreign banks to participate in the privatization of the large commercial banks can help to improve the efficiency of the banking system and the corporate governance role of banks. In order to encourage funds to manage their portfolios for the benefit of investors, funds should be encouraged to register as open-end unit trusts rather than as joint stock companies. On the macroeconomic level, the government is moving in the right direction. As regards the medium term outlook, fundamentals of the Czech economy remain strong. However, decisive and timely action to improve the institutional framework is needed if the economy is to overcome the present crisis and to reach a new, sustainable growth path. --

Complementarities in Corporate Governance - A Survey of the Literature with Special Emphasis on Japan

The present paper uses a comparison of Japan and the US to argue that the debate about corporate governance reform is best framed in terms of systems of complementary instruments and institutions. It argues that the Japanese and US systems of corporate governance differ along many dimensions, yet can both be understood as efficient combinations of complementary instruments adapted to a particular institutional and regulatory environment. The paper also shows how exogenous shocks and piecemeal regulatory reforms have undermined the internal consistency of the Japanese system in the recent past

Complementarities in Corporate Governance: Ownership Concentration, Capital Structure, Monitoring and Pecuniary Incentives

The paper shows that, as owners accumulate larger stakes and hence become less risk-tolerant, their incentives to monitor management are attenuated because monitoring shifts some of the firm's risk from management to owners. This counterbalances the positive effect which more concentrated ownership has on monitoring via reduced free rider problems. Moreover, the paper shows how the opportunity cost of concentrated ownership, which is the loss of risk-sharing benefits, creates scope to use leverage as an additional complementary governance instrument. The paper offers new explanations for several empirical regularities found in the literature

A Model of Corporate Governance As a System

This paper provides a rationale for the coexistence of different systems of corporate governance based on the multitude of agency problems typically to be governed within a given firm. Because there are complementarity and substitution relationships between governance instruments, specific combinations of instruments which reinforce each other in minimizing agency costs fit together better than alternative combinations. We derive comparative static results showing how various governance instruments can be combined to form a coherent system of corporate governance and how changes in exogenous parameters can lead to simultaneous, systemic changes in the instruments used

The merits of insider privatization: What Russia can learn from Eastern Central Europe

The debate on the privatization of enterprises in Eastern Europe often presumes that enterprises are still controlled by an identifiable entity called "the state". This, however, is no longer the case. Since the demise of tight central planning, the nominally state-owned enterprises are de facto steered by insiders such as incumbent managers, workers, and local administrators. As the customary property rights of insiders are not legally acknowledged and are thus not secure, insiders tend to adopt a myopic attitude, and neglect the long-run profitability of their firms. Centrally organized privatization programs to disburse ownership rights to non-insiders are usually advocated as the best way to improve the efficiency of the firms. However, such privatization programs challenge the present position of managers, workers, and local bureaucrats. The insiders therefore tend to resist the privatization programs. If the central government cannot quickly decide the ensuing power struggle in its favor, the establishment of secure and tradable private property rights is delayed and the performance of the enterprises may deteriorate even further in the meantime. The extent to which a central government needs to take the customary property rights of insiders into account in the design and implementation of its privatization policy depends on its political power. Whereas the government in former Czechoslovakia had been able to largely disregard the claims of insiders, governments such as the Polish one have been far less successful. The evidence supports the conclusion that a weak central state is ill posed to rapidly and successfully implement privatization strategies that disregard the customary rights of insiders. In Russia and most other successor states of the Soviet Union, the central authorities are in an extremely weak position relative to enterprises and local administrations. In order to privatize quickly, Russia should largely respect and formalize the customary property rights of insiders and make these rights tradable. Although Russia's present privatization approach grants managers, workers, and local bureaucrats more say in the privatization process than the respective programs in Eastern Central Europe, Russia would be well advised to enhance the preferential conditions for insiders even further and to scale down the scope of its voucher program. The criticisms voiced against insider privatization are not convincing. They either refer to general problems of the transformation process that no privatization method could avoid, or the criticisms refer to problems that only arise if insider privatization is deemed illegal by official policies that do not take customary property rights into account and that do not make the property rights openly tradable

The value of waiting: Russia's integration into the international capital markets

Capital flight has characterized the transformation process in Russia. Inflows of foreign direct investment have been minor and have been preceeded by inflows of portfolio capital. The paper shows that uncertainty about macroeconomic stabilization exhibits a strong negative effect on the volume of capital inflows when investment decisions are irreversible. Reducing uncertainty may but must not necessarily lead to more investment. The fact that monetary stabilization policies have not been accompanied by comprehensive institutional reforms can explain the pattern of Russia's capital flows in general and the dismal performance in attracting foreign direct investment in particular.

Taxing short-term capital flows - An option for transition economies?

This paper discusses whether the implementation of a tax on short-term capital flows can make the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe less vulnerable to adverse external shocks and to sudden withdrawals of foreign capital. The following section outlines the main arguments which are advanced by the supporters and opponents of a transactions tax on foreign capital flows. We also develop a simple theoretical framework which allows us to study the effects of a tax on capital inflows. The model reveals that it is important to distinguish between two effects of a transactions tax. On the one hand, a transactions tax might be a useful tool to discourage destabilizing trading strategies on the foreign exchange market. On the other hand, it should be taken into account that a tax on foreign capital flows pushes the economy to a new steady state. This induces an overshooting of the exchange rate if super efficient financial markets react faster than goods markets. Thus, the implementation of a transactions tax by itself can be viewed as a source of additional (excess) volatility of the exchange rate. Section 3 briefly discusses the experience of Chile which maintains a deposit requirement for short-term capital inflows. Section 4 gives an account of the structure of capital flows of the transition economies and of the restrictions which currently pertain to the capital account of the balance of payments. We restrict our analysis to four of the more advanced reform countries – i.e., the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland – because the policy issues of high capital inflows are most relevant for these countries. Section 5 concludes. -- Die Währungskrise, die in den letzten Monaten Asien erschütterte, zeigte einmal mehr, wie riskant es sein kann, aufstrebende Marktwirtschaften in den internationalen Markt mit einzubeziehen. Der vorliegende Diskussionsbeitrag befaßt sich mit der Frage, ob es sinnvoll wäre, den Kapitalzufluß in Transformationsländer durch Steuern zu regeln. Anhand von Grafiken und Tabellen werden die Entwicklung und der Verlauf von Finanzströmen verdeutlicht.