Developing economies have found it hard to use natural resource wealth to improve their economic performance. Utilizing resource endowments is a multistage economic and political problem that ...requires private investment to discover and extract the resource, fiscal regimes to capture revenue, judicious spending and investment decisions, and policies to manage volatility and mitigate adverse impacts on the rest of the economy. Experience is mixed, with some successes (such as Botswana and Malaysia) and more failures. This paper reviews the challenges that are faced in successfully managing resource wealth, the evidence on country performance, and the reasons for disappointing results.
This paper examines the aftermath of postwar financial crises in advanced countries. We construct a new semiannual series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967-2012. The ...series is based on assessments of the health of countries' financial systems from a consistent, real-time narrative source, and classifies financial distress on a relatively fine scale. We find that the average decline in output following a financial crisis is statistically significant and persistent, but only moderate in size. More important, we find that the average decline is sensitive to the specification and sample, and that the aftermath of crises is highly variable across major episodes. A simple forecasting exercise suggests that one important driver of the variation is the severity and persistence of financial distress itself. At the same time, we find little evidence of nonlinearities in the relationship between financial distress and the aftermaths of crises.
Sociologists have long examined how states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and professional groups interact in order to institutionalize ...their preferred norms at the transnational level. Yet, explanations of global norm-making that emphasize inter-organizational negotiations do not adequately explain the intra-organizational script-writing—that is, the codification of norms in prescriptive behavioral templates—that underpins this process. This article opens the black box of how scripts emerge and institutionalize within IGOs. Script-writing is a function of both world-cultural frames and material interests, held by different intra-organizational actors: scientific IGO staff and state representatives in governing bodies, respectively. The interplay between these frames and interests determines whether scripts will institutionalize. In this theoretical model, world-cultural and power-political explanations are pertinent to different, mutually informing, and coexisting aspects of the script-writing process. As a corollary of our approach, we present a conceptual framework for the study of intra-IGO script-writing, which is contingent on three normative struggles: among IGO staff, within an IGO's board of directors, and between the staff and the board. To empirically substantiate our arguments, we examine scripts on taxation and capital controls by the International Monetary Fund. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our model for the study of international organizations and the engines of global norm-making.
Demand Side Secular Stagnation Summers, Lawrence H.
The American economic review,
05/2015, Letnik:
105, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The experience of first Japan and now Europe and the USA suggests that Hansen's concept of secular stagnation is highly relevant. Recovery has been anemic and follows a generation of financially ...unsustainable and often lackluster growth. Investment demand has declined while the supply of saving has increased, leaving the economy vulnerable to liquidity traps. Although some US indicators have improved, forward real rates have declined sharply, European prospects remain muddled, and the zero-bound will likely constrain again during the next recession. Infrastructure and private investment are the best ways to both minimize the risk of secular stagnation and raise demand.
This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has ...been associated with lower growth than expected. The relation is particularly strong, both statistically and economically, early in the crisis. A natural interpretation is that fiscal multipliers were substantially higher than implicitly assumed by forecasters. The weaker relation in more recent years may in part reflect learning by forecasters and in part smaller multipliers than in the early years of the crisis. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
•Accountings like IPSAS, imposed on LDCs, are a new form of economic imperialism.•IPSAS may be inappropriate for developing economies with weak capital markets.•Accountability regimes are influenced ...by the socio-political and economic system.•LDCs like Nigeria need appropriate accountability systems of ‘reward’ or ‘sanction’.
This paper critically examines the implications for Nigeria’s indebtedness of neoliberalism as a neo-colonial dependency concept and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) as a technology of a new form of economic imperialism. As Nigeria’s huge oil and gas revenues continue to be lost to corruption, the country relies on loans from Paris Club countries and International Financial Institutions (IFIs), notably the World Bank. In 1999, when the country changed from military to democratic governance, Nigeria’s debt to the Paris Club and the World Bank was $30bn. With pressure from the Paris Club and the World Bank to repay its debts, the new democratic Nigerian government sought debt forgiveness and rescheduling. Although the World Bank, representing the creditors in debt negotiation, does not go into specific accounting standards to be adopted by debtor nations, the Bank does require Nigeria to embrace neoliberal economic reforms (including public sector reporting framework that produces consistently relevant and reliable financial information – which denotes IPSAS). Despite the partial debt forgiveness, repayment of the balance of the debt and adoption of IPSAS, Nigeria remains endemically corrupt, relies on loans from powerful nations and IFIs, and has again become debt-laden. Contrary to neoliberal assumptions therefore, we provide the evidence that better accounting may not necessarily be a panacea for economic development.
This study investigates the impact of institutional quality on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows using panel data for low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high-income countries for the sample ...period of 1996-2016 using the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The empirical results confirm that institutional quality has a positive impact on FDI in all group of countries. The magnitude of the coefficients of control of corruption, government effectiveness, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law, and voice and accountability for FDI inflows are greater in developed countries than in developing countries. We conclude that institutional quality is a more important determinant of FDI in developed countries than in developed countries. However, GDP per capita, agriculture value-added as a percentage of GDP, and inflation influence FDI inflows negatively in developed countries, while GDP per capita, trade openness, agriculture value-added as a percentage of GDP, and infrastructure have positive and statistically significant impacts on FDI inflows in developing countries. Trade openness as a percentage of GDP and infrastructure positively affect FDI in developed countries. From our analysis, we infer that institutional quality is a more important determinant of FDI in developed countries than in developing countries.
Are discrepancies between national exports and imports ever a legitimate cause for government concern or intervention? The question is as old as economic theory itself. Sixteenth-century English ...writers deplored the drainage of precious metals implied by decits in foreign trade; as a result, the term balance of trade had entered into public discourse by the early seventeenth century. David Hume's account in 1752 of the price-specie-ow mechanism, arguably the greatest set piece of classical monetary economics, vanquished for many years the mercantilist position that the perpetual accumulation of external wealth was both desirable and feasible. More than 250 years later, however, the foreign trade imbalances of national units - including even some that share common currencies - still gure prominently in debates over economic policy.
Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy ...norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powerful nation-states, and international financial institutions, that threaten sanctions or promise aid in return for fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc. Competition theorists argue that countries compete to attract investment and to sell exports by lowering the cost of doing business, reducing constraints on investment, or reducing tariff barriers in the hope of reciprocity. Learning theorists suggest that countries learn from their own experiences and, as well, from the policy experiments of their peers. We review the large body of research from sociologists and political scientists, as well as the growing body of work from economists and psychologists, pointing to the diverse mechanisms that are theorized and to promising avenues for distinguishing among causal mechanisms.
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