Az európai gazdasági kormányzás előtt álló kihívások. A hármas tagadás lehetetlensége (Challenges of European economic governance. The impossible trinity of denial.)

Az európai gazdasági integráció folyamata olyan kényszerhelyzetekben formálódott a múltban, amelyek a közgazdaságtudományban jól ismert lehetetlen háromság alapján is leírhatók. Az Európai Monetáris Rendszer a rögzített árfolyam-mechanizmusra és önálló jegybanki politikára épített, korlátozva a tőkemozgásokat. A Gazdasági és Monetáris Unió ugyanakkor a tőke szabad áramlásával és az árfolyamok visszavonhatatlan rögzítésével felszámolta a tagállami szintű jegybanki autonómiát. Az euróövezet működése egyszersmind arra a háromszoros tagadásra épül(t), hogy 1. nem lehetséges az euróövezetből való kilépés, 2. nem engedélyezett a kimentés és 3. nem kerülhet sor államcsődre. A 2008-ban Európát is elérő pénzügyi és gazdasági válság azonban elemi erővel mutatott rá e hármas tiltás tarthatatlanságára. A gazdasági kormányzás körül kibontakozott viták így jól közelíthetők a három tiltó szabály egyidejű érvényesülése lehetetlenségének bemutatásával, számba véve az egyes opciók költségeit és lehetséges hasznait. / === / The process of economic integration in the EU has been shaped by the well-known theorem of the impossible trinity. Accordingly, the European Monetary System was built upon a mix of a fixed exchange-rate regime and an autonomous monetary policy, thereby constraining capital mobility. In launching the EMU project, the EU countries decided to fix national currencies irrevocably and maintain full capital mobility, in exchange for delegating their monetary policy upwards to a supranational level. The introduction of the Euro zone, however, has simultaneously meant denial of the following three elements: (1) exit, (2) bail-out, and (3) default. Nevertheless, the 2008–9 financial and economic crisis has demonstrated mercilessly that these three pillars are incompatible with each other. So the current debates on reshaping economic governance in the EU can be modelled by introducing the “impossible trinity of denial”, concentrating on the benefits and the costs of each option.

Megmenthető-e az euróövezet? (Can the eurozone be saved?)

Az euró válságának szélesebb globális összefüggései vannak, mind a kiváltó okait, mind a nemzetközi pénzügyi rendszer működésének hiányosságait illetően. Az európai monetáris integráció szilárd reálgazdasági alapokon nyugszik. Az euró teljesítménye mind az árstabilitás, mind az árfolyamok ingadozása tekintetében megfelelőnek tekinthető. Az euróválság szuverénadósság-válság, és leginkább a zóna egyes (déli) országait érinti. Az euróválság okai többrétűek: ezek között az eurózóna hibás konstrukcióját, téves koncepcionális feltételezéseit, a politikai kompromisszumokkal folyamatosan megnyomorított működését említhetjük leginkább. A közös pénz önmagában nem oka a válságnak és nem is bűvös ellenszer. A hibás gazdaságpolitikáért belül ugyanúgy bűnhődni kell, mint kívül. Görögország, vagy Írország elsősorban nem azért került válságba, mert tagjai az eurózónának, hanem mert hibás gazdaságpolitikát folytattak. Nem zárható ki az eurózóna szétesése, de kicsi az esélye. / === / The euro crisis has broad global connections, both in terms of deficiencies of the international monetary system, and of the crisis of the global financial markets. The European monetary integration is based on strong real-economic foundations. The performance of the euro has been satisfactory both in terms of price and exchange rate stability. The present crisis is a sovereign debt crisis, and it is concentrated mainly on some Southern members. The causes of the crisis are manifold: wrong institutional and policy structures, mistaken conceptual assumptions, and the distortion of its operation by continuous political compromises. The contradictions between common monetary policy and the national fiscal policies, the failure of disciplining role of the markets, the weakness of control of national fiscal policies, the dangers of "one size fits all" monetary policy, the failure of finding the proper national policy mixes, particularly in terms of income and structural policies, and the underestimation of social and cultural differences, can be particularly stressed. The common monetary policy failed to secure the necessary equilibrium among liquidity, stability and growth. Greece and Ireland got in crisis not because they are members of the euro zone, but because of their mistaken economic policies. The collapse of the euro zone cannot be excluded, but the chances of it are limited.

The factors affecting the international judgement of the Forint and Zloty in the light of the financial crisis of year 2008

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 has shaken both money and capital markets. Its consequences have not even left European markets untouched and divided spirits in the financial world. In some countries efforts by the monetary policy to protect the national currency throughout the crisis seemed to be ineffective. In the present paper we are investigating the effect of the most important macroeconomic and economic policy factors on the exchange rate of the forint and zloty in the last decade. For an analysis of exchange rates we are relying on some preceding research results based on equilibrium exchange rate theories.

Kockázattal kiegészített Taylor-szabályok becslése Magyarországra = Estimation of risk-augmented Taylor rules for Hungary

Cikkünkben a magyar monetáris politikát vizsgáljuk olyan szempontból, hogy kamatdöntései meghozatalakor figyelembe vette-e az országkockázatot, és ha igen, hogyan. A kérdés megválaszolásához a monetáris politika elemzésének leggyakoribb eszközét használjuk: az ország monetáris politikáját leíró Taylor-szabályokat becslünk. A becslést több kockázati mérőszámmal is elvégeztük több, különféle Taylor-szabályt használva. Az érzékenységvizsgálatban az inflációhoz és a kibocsátási réshez is alkalmaztunk más, az alapspecifikációban szereplőtől eltérő mérőszámokat. Eredményeink szerint a Magyar Nemzeti Bank kamatdöntései jól leírhatók egy rugalmas, inflációs célkövető rezsimmel: a Taylor-szabályban szignifikáns szerepe van az inflációs céltól való eltérésének és - a szabályok egy része esetén - a kibocsátási résnek. Emellett a döntéshozók figyelembe vették az országkockázatot is, annak növekedésére a kamat emelésével válaszoltak. Az országkockázat Taylor-szabályba történő beillesztése a megfelelő kockázati mérőszám kiválasztása esetén jelentős mértékben képes javítani a Taylor-szabály illeszkedését. _____ The paper investigates the degree to which Hungarian monetary policy has considered country risk in its decisions and if so, how. The answer was sought through the commonest method of analysing a countrys monetary policy: Taylor rules for describing it. The estimation of the rule was prepared using several risk indicators and applying various types of Taylor rules. As a sensitivity analysis, other indicators of inflation and output gap were employed than in the base rule. This showed that the interest-rate decisions of the National Bank of Hungary can be well described by a flexible inflation targeting regime: in the Taylor rules, deviation of inflation from its target has a significant role and the output gap is also significant in one part of the rules. The decision-makers also considered country risk and responded to an increase in it by raising interest rates. Insertion of country risk into the Taylor rule could improve the models fit to an important degree when choosing an appropriate risk measure.

The Euro Area's Tightrope Walk: Debt and Competitiveness in Italy and Spain

- Competitiveness adjustment in struggling southern euro-area members requires persistently lower inflation than in major trading partners, but low inflation worsens public debt sustainability. When average euro-area inflation undershoots the two percent target, the conflict between intra-euro relative price adjustment and debt sustainability is more severe. - In our baseline scenario, the projected public debt ratio reduction in Italy and Spain is too slow and does not meet the European fiscal rule. Debt projections are very sensitive to underlying assumptions and even small negative deviations from GDP growth, inflation and budget surplus assumptions can easily result in a runaway debt trajectory. - The case for a greater than five percent of GDP primary budget surplus is very weak. Beyond vitally important structural reforms, the top priority is to ensure that euro-area inflation does not undershoot the two percent target, which requires national policy actions and more accommodative monetary policy. The latter would weaken the euro exchange rate, thereby facilitating further intra-euro adjustment. More effective policies are needed to foster growth. But if all else fails, the European Central Bank’s Outright Monetary Transactions could reduce borrowing costs.

Essays on international macroeconomics and conflict analysis

This dissertation addressed two broad problems in international macroeconomics and conflict analysis. The first problem in the first chapter looked at the behavior of exchange rate and its interaction with industry-level tradable goods prices for three countries, USA, UK and Japan. This question has important monetary policy implications. Here, I computed to what extent changes in exchange rate affected prices of consumer, producer, and export goods. I also studied the timing of these changes in these prices. My results, based on thirty-four industrial prices for USA, UK and Japan, supported the view that changes in exchange rates significantly affect prices of industrial and consumer goods. It also provided an insight to the underlying economic process that led to changes in relative prices. ^ In the second chapter, I explored the predictability of future inflation by incorporating shocks to exchange rates and clearly specified the transmission mechanisms that link exchange rates to industry-level consumer and producer prices. Employing a variety of linear and state-of-the-art nonlinear models, I also predicted growth rates of future prices. Comparing levels of inflation obtained from the above approaches showed superiority of the structural model incorporating the exchange rate pass-through effect. ^ The second broad issue addressed in the third chapter of the dissertation investigated the economic motives for conflict, manifested by rebellion and civil war for seventeen Latin American countries. Based on the analytical framework of Garfinkel, Skaperdas and Syropoulos (2004), I employed ordinal regressions and Markov switching for a panel of seventeen countries to identify trade and openness factors responsible for conflict occurrence and intensity. The results suggested that increased trade openness reduced high intensity domestic conflicts but overdependence on agricultural exports, along with a lack of income earning opportunities lead to more conflicts. Thereafter, using the Cox Proportional Hazard model I studied “conflict duration” and found that over-reliance on agricultural exports explained a major part of the length of conflicts in addition to various socio-political factors. ^

Connectionist-based rules describing the pass-through of individual goods prices into trend inflation in the United States

This paper demonstrates a mechanism whereby rules can be extracted from a feedforward neural network trained to characterize the inflation "pass-through" problem in American monetary policy, defined as the relationship between changes in the growth rate(s) of individual commodities and the economy-wide rate of growth of consumer prices. Monthly price data are encoded and used to train a group of candidate connectionist architectures. One candidate is selected for rule extraction, using a custom decompositional extraction algorithm that generates rules in human-readable and machine-executable form. Rule and network accuracy are compared, and comments are made on the relationships expressed within the discovered rules. The types of discovered relationships could be used to guide monetary policy decisions.

Central banking and inequalities: taking off the blinders

What is the relation between monetary policy and inequalities in income and wealth? This question has received insufficient attention, especially in light of the unconventional policies introduced since the 2008 financial crisis. The article analyzes three ways in which the concern central banks show for inequalities in their official statements remains incomplete and underdeveloped. First, central banks tend to care about inequality for instrumental reasons only. When they do assign intrinsic value to containing inequalities, they shy away from trade-offs with the standard objectives of monetary policy that such a position entails. Second, central banks play down the causal impact monetary policy has on inequalities. When they do acknowledge it, they defend their actions by claiming that it is an unintended side effect, that it is temporary, and/or that any alternative policy would fare even worse. The article appeals to the doctrine of double effect to criticize these arguments. Third, even if one accepts that inequalities should be contained and that today’s monetary policies exacerbate them, is it both desirable and feasible to make containing inequalities part of the mandate of central banks? The article analyzes and rejects three attempts on the part of central banks to answer this question negatively.

Pass-through of International food prices to domestic ination during and after the great recession: evidence from a set of Latin American economies

We examined how international food price shocks have impacted local ination processes in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru in the past decade -- Using impulse-response analysis coming from cointegrated VARs, we wind that international food ination shocks take from one to six quarters to pass through to domestic head-line ination, depending on the country -- In addition, by calculating the elasticity of local prices to an international food price shock, we found that this pass-through is not complete -- We also take a closer look at how this type of shock affects local food and core prices separately, and asses the possibility second round effects over core ination stemming from the shock -- We wind that a transmission to headline prices does occur, and that part of the transmission is associated with rising core prices both directly and through possible second round effects, which implies a role for monetary policy when such a shock takes place -- This is especially relevant given that international food prices have recently been on an upward trend after falling considerably during the Great Recession

Credibilidade não linear para as metas de inflação no Brasil

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a credibilidade do regime de metas de inflação no Brasil e propor um novo método de mensurá-la. Para tanto revisamos alguns índices de credibilidade anteriormente propostos para o país. Uma limitação comum a esses índices é o pressuposto de uma relação linear da credibilidade com os desvios da meta central de inflação. Neste sentido, é proposto um novo índice no qual a credibilidade depende de forma não linear dos afastamentos da meta e calculado o índice para o período de 2001 a 2012. Em um estudo comparativo, utilizando variáveis relacionadas à credibilidade, encontramos coeficientes de correlação maiores para o novo índice. Também se identificou uma alta credibilidade da política monetá- ria para o Brasil nos últimos anos.

Fragilidad financiera en Colombia y las decisiones de política monetaria del Banco de la República, 1996-2012

Este artículo evalúa cuál ha sido el papel de las decisiones de política monetaria del Banco de la República dentro de los procesos de inestabilidad financiera acaecidos en Colombia en el período 1996-2012. Según la revisión de hechos, la crisis de 1999 puso en duda el papel estabilizador del banco central, lo cual reflejó una postura contra-cíclica demasiado débil para la recuperación, y la crisis de 2008 encontró un banco más preparado, aunque con respuesta tardía a los procesos emergentes de fragilidad financiera. A través de estimaciones econométricas se evidencia que una política monetaria contractiva puede inducir una crisis financiera cuando la reacción se da en momentos de mayor estrés financiero.

Fast-Track Authority and International Trade Negotiations

Fast Track Authority (FTA) is the institutional procedure in the Unites States whereby Congress grants to the President the power to negotiate international trade agreements. Under FTA, Congress can only approve or reject negotiated trade deals, with no possibility of amending them. In this paper, we examine the determinants of FTA voting decisions and the implications of this institutional procedure for trade negotiations. We describe a simple two-country trade model, in which industries are unevenly distributed across con- stituencies. In the foreign country, trade negotiating authority is delegated to the executive, while in the home country Congress can retain the power to amend trade agreements. We show that legislators’ FTA voting behavior depends on the trade policy interests of their own constituencies as well as those of the majority of Congress. Empirical analysis of the determinants of all FTA votes between 1974 (when fast track was first introduced) and 2002 (when it was last granted) provides strong support for the predictions of our model.

LA POLÍTICA MONETARIA ANTE LA CRISIS

Resumen La actuación del Banco Central frente a la crisis ha sido objeto de críticas constantes por distintos sectores del país, pues su accionar se considera pobre e inclusive equivocado. Los problemas de la gestión de la política monetaria no son recientes, iniciaron en el 2006 con la implementación del sistema de bandas cambiarias. El sistema como tal no tiene fallas, sin embargo, las autoridades han cometido errores importantes en su aplicación que dificultan adoptar medidas anticrisis en el presente. Una política monetaria procíclica es quizás el principal problema que enfrenta el Banco Central, que en la actualidad afronta una fuerte contracción de la economía costarricense y no ha creado las condiciones para aplicar medidas paliativas. Adicionalmente, el Banco aún no reconoce la contradicción de sus medidas y pronto deberá enfrentarse a una disminución de las tasas de interés y un ajuste del tipo de cambio. Abstract The Central Bank's performance against the crisis has been the subject of critics by different economic sectors, because its performance is considered poor or even wrong. The problems of management of monetary policy are not recent, initiated in 2006 with the reform of foreign exchange policy. The system itself has no faults, but the authorities have made mistakes in its implementation that difficult the anticrisis action. A procyclical monetary policy is perhaps the biggest problem facing the Central Bank, which now faces a sharp contraction in the Costa Rican economy and has created the conditions for implementing mitigation measures. Additionally, the Bank still does not recognize the contradiction in their policies, and must soon face a reduction in interest rates and exchange rate adjustment.

Understanding import diversification: an empirical analysis

This paper analyzes import diversification in an aggregated perspective -- Using a dataset for 60 countries covering the period 1995-2010, we study the main determinants of import diversification -- We expect to contribute to the current literature, taking into account that there have been few empirical studies addressing import diversification and more specifically, at the cross-country level -- We take into account variables classified into four categories: Structural factors, macroeconomic factors, international trade factors and political factors -- We find robust evidence that total factor productivity (TFP), capital stock, real Exchange rates and terms of trade are key drivers of import diversification -- On the other hand, domestic consumption and trade openness exert an effect leading to import concentration -- We interpret this finding, taking into account the theoretical framework provided by the international trade and growth theories

INFLACIÓN E INCERTIDUMBRE INFLACIONARIA: EVIDENCIA PARA COSTA RICA

En este documento se estima una medida de la incertidumbre inflacionaria. Un modelo de inflación señala incertidumbre cuando los errores de pronóstico son heteroscedásticos. Por medio de la especificación de una ecuación GARCH (Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity), para la varianza del término de error de un modelo de inflación, es posible estimar una proxy de incertidumbre inflacionaria. La estimación simultánea del modelo de inflación y de la ecuación GARCH, produce un nuevo modelo de inflación en el cual los errores de pronóstico son homocedásticos. Existe consenso en la literatura económica en que hay una correlación positiva entre incertidumbre inflacionaria y la magnitud de la tasa de inflación, lo cual, como lo señaló Friedman (1977), representa uno de los costos asociados con la persistencia inflacionaria. Esto es porque tal incertidumbre dificulta la toma de decisiones óptimas por parte de los agentes económicos.La evidencia empírica, para el periodo 1954:01-2002:08, apoya la hipótesis de que para el caso de Costa Rica mientras mayor es la inflación mayor es la incertidumbre respecto a esta variable. En los últimos siete años (1997-2002) la incertidumbre presenta la variación media más baja de todo el periodo. Además, se identifica un efecto asimétrico de la inflación sobre la incertidumbre inflacionaria, es decir, la incertidumbre inflacionaria tiende a incrementarse más para el siguiente periodo cuando la inflación pronosticada está por debajo de la inflación actual, que cuando la inflación pronosticada está por arriba de la tasa observada de inflación. Estos resultados tienen una clara implicación para la política monetaria. Para minimizar la dificultad que la inflación causa en la toma óptima de decisiones de los agentes económicos es necesario perseguir no solamente un nivel bajo de inflación sino que también sea estable.AbstractThis paper estimates a measure of inflationary uncertainty. An inflation model signals uncertainty when the forecast errors are heteroskedastic. By the specification of a GARCH (Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity) equation, for the variance of the error term of the inflation model, it is possible to estimate a proxy for inflationary uncertainty. By the simultaneous estimation of the inflation model and the GARCH equation, a new inflation model is obtained in which the forecast errors are homocedastic. Most economists agree that there is a positive correlation between inflationary uncertainty and the magnitude of the inflation rate, which, as was pointed out by Friedman (1977), represents one of costs associated with the persistence of inflation. This is because such uncertainty clouds the decision-making process of consumers and investors.The empirical evidence for the period 1954:01-2002:08 confirms that in the case of Costa Rica inflationary uncertainty increases as inflation rises. In the last seven years(1997-2002) the uncertainty present the mean variation most small of the period. In addition, inflation has an asymmetric effect on inflationary uncertainty. That is, when the inflation forecast is below the actual inflation, inflationary uncertainty increases for the next period. The opposite happens when the inflation forecast is above the observed rate of inflation. Besides, the absolute value of the change on uncertainty is greater in the first case than the second. These results have a clear implication for monetary policy. To minimize the disruptions that inflation causes to the economic decision-making process, it is necessary to pursue, not only a low level of inflation, but a stable one as well.