Suchergebnisse

Using urban household surveys, we constructed a panel dataset to study the effects of the Argentine macroeconomic crisis of 1999-2002 with the aim of (1) identifying the most vulnerable households, (2) investigating whether employment in the public sector and government spending served to decrease vulnerability, and (3) understanding the mechanisms used by households to smooth the effects of the crisis. Households whose heads were male, less educated, and employed in the construction sector were more vulnerable to the crisis, experiencing larger-than-average declines in income and higher dispersion. Households whose heads were employed in the public sector were more protected from the crisis, although higher public spending did not serve to decrease their vulnerability. A significant source of vulnerability was linked to changes in employment status, and we studied the determinants of the probability of being unemployed and of becoming unemployed. Last, we found that households were unable to perfectly smooth income shocks. Given these results, there is room for broadening social safety nets, particularly in the form of public works programs. ; Departamento de Economía

This paper argues that the global macroeconomy has been highly unstable. The combination of undervalued exchange rates in East Asia and the use by the US of monetary policy to ensure a steady growth led to an outcome in which interest rates fell a great deal. In the presence of a highly leveraged financial system, such a large fall in interest rates created a very large rise in the price of financial assets—in particular houses in the US. These high asset prices could not be sustained in the face of rising interest rates, and their collapse led to the present crisis. The paper argues that a global regime will be necessary that constrains excessively high savings in East Asia, and elsewhere, and constrains excessive fiscal deficits in the US, and elsewhere. Such a regime would also constrain global imbalances.

Ghana is in the midst of a severe but not unprecedented macroeconomic crisis. This paper helps to evaluate the government's policy options by (1) explaining the crisis' causes, and (2) comparing it to previous macroeconomic crises and the policies that corrected them. Two large shocks are to blame for the crisis: an increase in the fiscal deficit of about 6 percent of GDP and a reduction in hydroelectric production that has not been replaced with thermal generation. This latter is more difficult to quantify, but may be as large as 4 percent of GDP. While large, Ghana has recovered from similar shocks in the past, and with luck, should be able to do so now. But this will require reversal of the large increases in the public sector wage bill that drove much of the fiscal shock. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2; F Strengthening institutions and governance ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

This paper sets out to develop an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This a priori framework is a significant improvement over existing critical juncture frameworks that lack any predictive element. It is an advance for historical institutionalism in particular, and political science in general. After the new framework is set out in detail here, it is tested. The framework is used to examine a number of potential critical junctures in macroeconomic policy, drawn from Ireland, Sweden, Britain, and America in the latter half of the twentieth century

Mainstream macroeconomic theory, especially as synthesized in the New Neoclassical Synthesis, is argued to have many problematic aspects, problems which have been especially underscored by the recent economic crisis, and which relate to its method, its views of the economy, and its goals and its policy implications. These failings call for greater pluralism in macroeconomic theory and greater acceptance of alternative approaches. One of these—which is based on accounting identities and behavioral and institutional relations, which stresses the importance of uncertainty and power, emphasizes the goals of reducing unemployment and distributional fairness, and views policymaking as an art—is particularly worthy of attention. JEL classification: B22, B41, E00