Working Papers
2022
May 27, 2022
The Current Account Income Balance: External Adjustment Channel or Vulnerability Amplifier?
Description: In terms of size, the net income balance (IB) is comparable to the trade balance (TB) for many countries. Yet the role of the IB in mitigating external vulnerabilities or complicating external adjustment remains underexplored. This paper studies the role of the IB in stabilizing or destabilizing the current account over the cycle and in crises. Our results show that, due to a negative correlation with the TB, the IB significantly dampens the time series volatility of the current account for most countries. However, the IB generally does not improve during crisis episodes, so current account adjustment occurs entirely through improvements in the TB. The paper also estimates IB semi-elasticities with respect to the exchange rate (ER). Semi-elasticities are small for most countries, so the IB is generally not a significant channel through which the ER stabilizes the current account, and trade-based semi-elasticities are, with some important exceptions, good proxies for current account semi-elasticities used in external sector assessments.
May 26, 2022
Finance Vaccine Equity: Funding for Day-Zero of the Next Pandemic
Description: A lack of timely financing for purchases of vaccines and other health products impeded the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on analysis of contract signature and delivery dates in COVID-19 vaccine advance purchase agreements, this paper finds that 60-75 percent of the delay in vaccine deliveries to low- and middle-income countries is attributable to their signing purchase agreements later than high-income countries, which placed them further behind in the delivery line. A pandemic Advance Commitment Facility with access to a credit line on day-zero of the next pandemic could allow low- and middle-income countries to secure orders earlier, ensuring a much faster and equitable global response than during COVD-19. The paper outlines four options for a financier to absorb some or all of the risk associated with the credit line and discusses how the credit would complement other proposals to strengthen the financing architecture for pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response.
May 20, 2022
Sovereign Eurobond Liquidity and Yields
Description: Market liquidity is of value to both investors and issuers of securities, and is therefore a crucial factor in asset pricing. For the important asset class of Eurobonds, significant feedback from liquidity to pricing is established, and it is shown that bid-ask spreads (a proxy for market liquidity) and yields are closely related to bond characteristics such as issue volume, time to maturity, the inclusion of collective action clauses, and the jurisdiction of issuance. Debt management offices can choose these characteristics in a way that has economically significant and persistent effects on both liquidity and pricing.
May 20, 2022
Seven Finance & Trade Lessons from COVID-19 for Future Pandemics
Description: Pandemics and epidemics pose risks to lives, societies, and economies, and their frequency is expected to increase as rising trade and increased human interaction with animals leads to the emergence of new diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic teaches us that we can and must be better prepared, with scope for much greater global coordination to address the financing, supply-chain, and trade barriers that amplified the pandemic’s economic costs and contributed to the emergence of new variants. This paper draws seven early lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic that could inform future policy priorities and help shape a better global response to future crises.
May 20, 2022
Do Monetary Policy Outcomes Promote Stability in Fragile Settings?
Description: This paper assesses how monetary policy outcomes affect fragility. Diving into the universe of the most prominent combinations of pursued monetary policy objectives across fragile settings, we examine the relationships between monetary policy outcomes and fragility and find the combination of reduction of inflation and lower unemployment to be the one that delivers the highest payoff in terms of promoting peace and cohesion. Setting aside challenges of monetary policy transmission, results from our analysis broadly confirm the above “winning” combination, with low inflation as a primary desired outcome and low unemployment rate as a secondary one. We also carry out a series of robustness tests, which confirm our findings. Overall, our results lend credence to the importance of paying attention—in the context of reducing fragility—to monetary policy outcomes.
May 20, 2022
Road Quality and Mean Speed Score
Description: We introduce a novel measure of cross-country road quality based on the travel mean speed between large cities from Google Maps. This measure is useful to assess road infrastructure and access gaps. Our Mean Speed (MS) score is easier to estimate and update than traditional gauges of road network quality which rely on official reports, surveys (i.e., World Economic Forum’s Quality of Roads Perception survey), or satellite imaging (i.e., World Bank’s Rural Access Index). In a sample of over 160 countries, we find that MS scores range between 38 km/h (23.6 mph) and 107 km/h (66.5 mph). We show that the MS score is a strong proxy for road quality and access.
May 20, 2022
Assessing Vulnerabilities to Corruption in Public Procurement and Their Price Impact
Description: Public procurement can be highly vulnerable to corruption. This paper outlines a methodology and results in assessing corruption risks in public procurement and their impact on relative prices, using large databases on government contracts and tenders. Our primary contribution is to analyze how price differential in public procurement contracts can be explained by corruption risk factor (aggregated in a synthetic corruption risk index). While there are intrinsic limitations to our study (price differentials can come from structural reasons, such as a limited number of potential suppliers) it still provides a guiding tool to assess where corruption risks would have the biggest budgetary impact. Such analysis helps inform mitigating policies owing to the granular data used.
May 13, 2022
Inflation Dynamics in Advanced Economies: A Decomposition into Cyclical and Non-Cyclical Factors
Description: Inflation and unemployment rate were largely disconnected between 2000 and 2019 in advanced economies. We decompose core inflation into two parts based on the cyclical sensitivity of CPI components and document several salient facts: (i) both the cyclical and non-cyclical parts had surges across advaced economies in 2011, when unemployment rates had limited changes; (ii) the non-cyclical part had a downward trend between 2012 and 2019, which existed across countries, sectors, goods, and services; (iii) global indexes such as oil price, shipping costs, and a global supply chain pressure index do not explain the downward trend; and (iv) the cyclical part, after controlling for the impact of economic slack, also had a downward trend between 2012 and 2019. These patterns help disentangle competing explanations for the disconnect between inflation and unemployment rate. The approach has potential to help understand forces shaping price pressures during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic period ahead.
May 13, 2022
Bilateral Trade Imbalances
Description: If sectoral trade flows obey structural gravity, countries' bilateral trade imbalances are the result of macro trade imbalances, “triangular trade”, or pairwise asymmetric trade barriers. Using data for 40 major economies and the Rest of the World, we show that large and pervasive asymmetries in trade barriers are required to account for most of the observed variation in bilateral imbalances. A dynamic quantitative trade model suggests that eliminating these asymmetries would significantly reduce bilateral (but not macro) imbalances and have sizeable impacts on welfare. We provide evidence that the asymmetries we measure are in part related to the policy environment: trade inside the European Single Market appears to be subject to more bilaterally symmetric frictions. Extending the same symmetry to all parts of the global economy would give a large boost to the real incomes of several non-E.U. countries.
May 13, 2022
The Japanese Labor Market During the COVID- 19 Pandemic
Description: This paper investigates labor market dynamics in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic drawing on macro and micro data. The pandemic and related containment measures had a large negative impact on employment, labor force participation, earnings, and labor market mobility, although policy support through furlough schemes partially mitigated the rise in unemployment. Our results indicate that industry effects were a crucial driver of labor market outcomes for different groups of employees — women, younger age groups, nonregular, self-employed, and low-income workers accounted for a disproportional share of employment in the hardest hit industries. We also find empirical evidence for the need to improve childcare and related support, training and upskilling offerings, and teleworking availability, and the role of skill mismatches in reducing labor market mobility and resource reallocation.