Balance of payment crises in emerging markets: how early were the “early” warning signals?

Although many papers have already proposed empirical models of currency crises, the timing of such crises has received relatively little attention so far. Most papers use indeed a static specification and impose the same lag structure across all explanatory variables. This, by construction, prevents from specifically timing the crisis signals sent by the leading indicators. The objective here is to fill this gap by considering a set of dynamic discrete choice models. The first contribution is to identify how early in advance each explanatory variable sends a warning signal. Some indicators are found to signal a crisis in the very short run while others signal a crisis at more distant horizons. The second contribution is to show that state dependence matters, albeit mostly in the short run. The results have important implications for crisis prevention in terms of the timeliness and usefulness of the envisaged policy response. JEL Classification: C23, F15, F14balance of payments, currency crises, debt ratios, Dynamic discrete choice, emerging markets, panel data, sudden stop

Exchange rate pass-through to trade prices: the role of non-linearities and asymmetries

A standard assumption in the empirical literature is that exchange rate pass-through is both linear and symmetric, implying that (a) large and small exchange rate changes and (b) appreciations and depreciations have an effect of the same magnitude, proportionally. This paper tests these assumptions for export and import prices in the G7 economies. It focuses on non-linearities in the reaction of profit margins to exchange rate movements, which may arise from the presence of price rigidities and switching costs. To this end, nonlinearities are characterised by augmenting a standard linear model with polynomial functions of the exchange rate and with interactive dummy variables. The presence of such non-linearities is confirmed by formal statistical tests. Overall, the results suggest that non-linearities and asymmetries in the exchange rate pass-through cannot be ignored, especially on the export side, although their magnitude varies noticeably across countries. JEL Classification: C22, C51, F14, F31Exchange Rate Pass-Through, Non-linear Model, Trade Prices

Towards a new early warning system of financial crises

This paper develops a new Early Warning System (EWS) model for predicting financial crises, based on a multinomial logit model. It is shown that EWS approaches based on binomial discrete-dependent-variable models can be subject to what we call a post-crisis bias. This bias arises when no distinction is made between tranquil periods, when economic fundamentals are largely sound and sustainable, and crisis/post-crisis periods, when economic variables go through an adjustment process before reaching a more sustainable level or growth path. We show that applying a multinomial logit model, which allows distinguishing between more than two states, is a valid way of solving this problem and constitutes a substantial improvement in the ability to forecast financial crises. The empirical results reveal that, for a set of 32 open emerging markets from 1993 till the present, the model would have correctly predicted a large majority of crises in emerging markets. Moreover, we derive general results about the optimal design of EWS models, which allows policy-makers to make an optimal choice based on their degree of risk-aversion against unanticipated financial crises. JEL Classification: F31, F47, F30crisis prediction, currency crises, Early Warning System

Evaluating China’s integration in world trade with a gravity model based benchmark

The rapid transition of China from a closed agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse has been associated with a rapid increase in the share of China in world trade. As the world is taking the full measure of this phenomenon, tensions have been arising ranging from holding China partly responsible for global imbalances to complaints about the “excessive” competitiveness of Chinese products. Without a quantifiable benchmark, however, such claims are difficult to judge. This paper therefore provides an assessment of China’s “natural” place in the world economy based on a new set of trade integration indicators. These indicators are used as a benchmark in order to examine whether China’s share in international trade is consistent with fundamentals such as economic size, location and other relevant factors. They constitute a better measure of trade integration that incorporates many more factors than traditional openness ratios. Results show that the model tracks international trade well and confirm that China is already well integrated in world markets, particularly with North America, several Latin American and East Asian emerging markets and most euro area countries. JEL Classification: C23, F15, F14China, Gravity Model, panel data, Trade

Financial openness and growth: short-run gain, long-run pain?

No empirical evidence has yet emerged for the existence of a robust positive relationship between financial openness and economic growth. This paper argues that a key reason for the elusive evidence is the presence of a time-varying relationship between openness and growth over time: countries tend to gain in the short-term, immediately following capital account liberalisation, but may not grow faster or even experience temporary growth reversals in the medium- to long-term. The paper finds substantial empirical evidence for the existence of such an intertemporal trade-off for 45 industrialised and emerging market economies. The acceleration of growth immediately after liberalisation is found to be often driven by an investment boom and a surge in portfolio and debt inflows. By contrast, the quality of domestic institutions, the size of FDI inflows and the sequencing of the liberalisation process are found to be important driving forces for growth in the medium to longer term. JEL Classification: F33, F34, F36, F43capital account, composition of capital flows, Economic Growth, intertemporal trade-off, liberalisation, quality of institutions, sequencing

Exchange rate pass-through in the global economy – the role of emerging market economies

This paper estimates export and import price equations for 41 countries –including 28 emerging market economies. Further, it relates the estimated elasticities to structural factors and tests for statistical breaks in the relation between trade prices and exchange rates. Results indicate that (i) the elasticity of trade prices in emerging markets is sizeable, but not significantly higher than in advanced economies; (ii) such elasticity is primarily influenced by macroeconomic factors such as the exchange rate regime and the inflationary environment, although microeconomic factors such as product differentiation also play a role; (iii) export and import price elasticities tend to be strongly correlated across countries; (iv) pass-through to import prices has declined in some advanced economies, noticeably the United States; this is consistent with a rise in pricing-to-market in several EMEs and especially with a change in the geographical composition of U.S. imports.emerging market economies; exchange rate pass-through; pricing-to-market; local and producer currency pricing; exchange rate regime

Exchange rate pass-through in the global economy: the role of emerging market economies

This paper estimates export and import price equations for 41 countries –including 28 emerging market economies. Further, it relates the estimated elasticities to structural factors and tests for statistical breaks in the relation between trade prices and exchange rates. Results indicate that (i) the elasticity of trade prices in emerging markets is sizeable, but not significantly higher than in advanced economies; (ii) such elasticity is primarily influenced by macroeconomic factors such as the exchange rate regime and the inflationary environment, although microeconomic factors such as product differentiation also play a role; (iii) export and import price elasticities tend to be strongly correlated across countries; (iv) pass-through to import prices has declined in some advanced economies, noticeably the United States; this is consistent with a rise in pricing-to-market in several EMEs and especially with a change in the geographical composition of U.S. imports. JEL Classification: F10, F30, F41Emerging market economies, Exchange Rate Pass-Through, exchange rate regime, local and producer currency pricing, pricing-to-market

Modelling global trade flows: results from a GVAR model

This paper uses a Global Vector Auto-Regression (GVAR)model in a panel of 21 emerging market and advanced economies to investigate the factors behind the dynamics of global trade flows, with a particular view on the issue of global trade imbalances and on the conditions of their unwinding. The GVAR approach enables us to make two key contributions: first, to model international linkages among a large number of countries, which is a key asset given the diversity of countries and regions involved in global imbalances, and second, to model exports and imports jointly. The latter proves to be very important due to the inter-nationalisation of production and the high import content of exports. The model can be used to gauge the effect on trade flows of various scenarios, such as an output shock in the United States, a shock to the US real effective exchange rate and shocks to foreign (German and Chinese) variables. Results indicate in particular that world exports respond much more to a (normalised) shock to US output than to a real effective depreciation of the dollar. In addition, the model can be used to monitor trade developments, such as the sharp contraction in world trade that took place in the wake of the financial crisis. While the fall in imports seems well accounted for by the model, the fall in exports of several countries remains partly unexplained, suggesting perhaps that specific factors might have been at play during the crisis. JEL Classification: F10, F17, F32, C33Exchange Rates, global imbalances, Global VAR, international trade, trade elasticities

Does the euro make a difference? Spatio-temporal transmission of global shocks to real effective exchange rates in an infinite VAR

This paper provides evidence on whether the creation of the euro has changed the way global turbulences affect euro area and other economies. Specifically, it considers the impact of global shocks on the competitiveness of individual euro area countries and assesses whether their responses to such shocks have converged, as well as to what pattern. Technically, the paper applies a newly developed methodology based on infinite VAR theory featuring a dominant unit to a large set of over 60 countries' real effective exchange rates, including those of the individual euro area economies, and compares impulse response functions to the estimated systems before and after EMU with respect to three types of shocks: a global US dollar shock, generalised impulse response function shocks and a global shock to risk aversion. Our results show that the way euro area countries' real effective exchange rates adjust to these shocks has converged indeed, albeit to a pattern that depends crucially on the nature of the shock. This result is noteworthy given the apparent divergence in competitiveness indicators of these countries in the first ten years of EMU, which suggests that this diverging pattern is unlikely to be due to global external shocks with asymmetric effects but rather to other factors, such as country-specific domestic shocks. JEL Classification: C21, C23euro, High-Dimensional VAR, Identification of Shocks, Real Effective Exchange Rates, Weak and Strong Cross Sectional Dependence

Trade integration of Central and Eastern European countries: lessons from a gravity model

The aim of the paper is to analyse the factors behind the rapid trade integration of the Central and Eastern European countries with the euro area in the past ten years and to gauge the potential for further integration. We use as benchmark an enhanced gravity model estimated with a large sample of bilateral trade flows across 61 countries since 1980. We show that a careful examination of the fixed effects of the model is crucial for the proper interpretation of the results: simply extracting the predicted values of the regression (“in-sample”) – as commonly done in the literature – leads to distorted results as it fails to take the transition process properly into account. As an alternative, we propose a two-stage “out-of-sample” approach. The results suggest that trade integration between most of the largest Central and Eastern European countries and the euro area is already relatively advanced, while the Baltic countries as well as the South Eastern European countries still have significant scope for integration. JEL Classification: C23, F15, F14Central and Eastern European Countries, Free Trade Agreement, Gravity Model, panel data, Transition Economies