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We evaluate the change in international reserves in the aftermath of significant external shocks by using a quasi-experimental setup and focusing on earthquakes. Our objective is to understand the macroeconomic dynamics of quake-affected countries ex-post, and their ex-ante disaster risk mitigation strategies. The estimation is done on a panel of 103 countries over the period 1979–2016. We find that in the five years following a large earthquake: (i) Countries exposed to it accumulate reserves ex-post for precautionary reasons, supported by the inflows of foreign assistance and money expansion; (ii) Quake-prone countries tend to hold fewer reserves relative to the non-prone countries, suggested by the richer set of other disaster preventive measures in place for the former; (iii) The patterns of reserves holding post-earthquake vary with a country’s income level and other macroeconomic fundamentals.

This paper reviews the patterns of sectoral debts and growth and the mechanisms explaining the adverse effects of debt burdens on growth rates. The empirical analysis covers a sample of 55 emerging and frontier market economies. Future economic growth is more sensitive to rising household debt than corporate debt. However, these effects are highly heterogenous across economies and depend on relative income.

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government debt. To address the likely endogeneity of government assistance under the pandemic, we instrument for extra-normal spending using disparities in pre-existing national political characteristics for identification. Our results indicate that while higher government spending was associated with higher commercial bank lending, higher public debt going into the crisis weakened the expansionary effects of higher spending on bank lending at economically and statistically significant levels. Moreover, this sensitivity is higher among weaker banks, suggesting that bank lending responses to government spending under COVID-19 reflected the perceived implications of such spending for government assistance of the banking sector going forward. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity analyses, including perturbations in specification, sample, and estimation methodology.

The central objective of this paper is to empirically assess whether countries with better information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure suffered less GDP growth deceleration during COVID-19. The scope of this paper is to apply linear estimation to a sample of 117 economies, including 86 emerging market and developing economies and 31 advanced economies, to analyze the relationship between ICT and GDP growth deceleration during the pandemic period. Controlling for other variables that can also influence economic performance, we find empirical support for a positive impact of ICT. For a given COVID-19 infection rate, we find that economies with better internet access showed greater resilience, defined as less in terms of economic growth. The obvious policy implication is that governments should invest more in ICT infrastructure to strengthen the resilience of their economies in the face of major shocks.

This paper presents empirical evidence that different types of entrepreneurship have varied effects across economies based on a cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth. Entrepreneurs contribute to innovation and, more broadly, to competition and economic dynamism. In particular, the paper reveals data showing that opportunity-driven entrepreneurship is positively related to growth in developing economies where manufacturing is significant.

This paper analyzes how substantial fiscal policy stimulus in response to COVID-19, combined with the impact of the downturn on revenues, has severely weakened public finances in many developing Asian economies. Analysis drawing on newly compiled data shows that while tax revenues in developing Asia steadily rose in the 2 decades before the COVID–19 pandemic, they continued to lag well behind high-income economies and some developing peers. The region relies on indirect taxes, creating a relatively efficient but less progressive tax structure, while government expenditures on education and health were comparatively modest.

This paper examines tax revenue mobilization in developing Asia before the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and in 2020. Analysis suggests that short- and long-run tax buoyancy in developing Asia were close to one before COVID-19, indicating fiscal sustainability. The study estimates that in 2020 the pandemic caused these economies to lose average excess tax revenue equal to half a percentage point of 2019 GDP. It also finds that tax-to-GDP ratios are projected to improve toward 2030 in a majority of developing Asian economies, other things held constant.

Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors are our focus. We ask what were the factors that are associated with the structure of the fiscal programs that governments chose to adopt in the early stage of the pandemic in 2020. We answer this question using details about the fiscal programs that were announced by 98 governments in the first six months of the pandemic, together with a large set of explanatory variables. Maybe not surprisingly, we find that politics played a very significant part in determining the size and composition of these fiscal programs. Governments and societies that are less polarized and more capable were able to mobilise more fiscal resources. We also find that it was governments with bigger debt loads that announced bigger programs, but that sovereign spreads were not so clearly associated with the size of these program plans. There is a limit, however, to what we can glean from these cross-country comparisons. Ultimately, the understanding of the politics and political-economy considerations that led to the specific content of each fiscal program will have to rely on information about the actual deliberations in each government’s halls of power, should these ever become public.

This paper outlines a tractable cost‐benefit analysis of the buffer stock financial services provided by international reserves (IR) and applies it to eight of the largest Emerging Markets (BRICS, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey) during 2000–2019. The efficient management of IR generates sizable benefits for countries characterized by hard‐currency external debt. These benefits increase with the volatility of the real exchange rates and sovereign spreads. While the first‐best policy calls for prudential regulations, counter‐cyclical management of hoarding reserves in good times and selling them in bad times provides buffers stock financial services adding up to about 3% of the gross domestic product during our sample period.

This paper compares fiscal cyclicality across advanced and developing countries, geographic regions as well as income levels over 1960–2016 period, then identifies factors that explain countries’ government spending and tax-policy cyclicality. Public debt/tax base ratio provides a more robust explanation for government-spending cyclicality than public debt/output ratio but the reverse is true when capital investment is accounted for in government spending. On average, a more indebted (relative to tax base) government spends more in good times and cuts back spending indifferently compared with a low-debt country in bad times. We also find that country's sovereign wealth fund has a countercyclical effect in our estimation. Finally, the analysis depicts a significant economic impact of an enduring interest-rate rise on fiscal space, that is, a 10% increase of public debt/tax base ratio is associated with an upper bound of 5.9% increase in government-spending procyclicality.

We evaluate quartile rankings of countries during the Covid-19 pandemic using both official (confirmed) and excess mortality data. By December 2021, the quartile rankings of three-fifths of the countries differ when ranked by excess vs. official mortality. Countries that are 'doing substantially better' in the excess mortality are characterized by higher urban population shares; higher GDP/Capita; and higher scores on institutional and policy variables. We perform two regressions in which the ratio of Cumulative Excess to Official Covid-19 mortalities (E/O ratio) is regressed on covariates. In a narrow study, controlling for GDP/Capita and vaccination rates, by December 2021 the E/O ratio was smaller in countries with higher vaccination rates. In a broad study, adding institutional and policy variables, the E/O ratio was smaller in countries with higher degree of voice and accountability. The arrival of vaccines in 2021 and voice and accountability had a discernible association on the E/O ratio.

We evaluate the 1968 H3N2 Flu pandemic's economic cost in a cross-section of 52 countries. Using excess mortality rates as a proxy for the country-specific severity of the pandemic, we find that the average mortality rate (0.0062% per pandemic wave) was associated with a decline in output of 2.4% over the two pandemic waves. Our estimates also suggest the losses in consumption (-1.9%), investment (-1.2%), and productivity (-1.9%) over the two pandemic waves. The results are robust across regressions using alternative measures of mortality and output loss. The study adds to the current literature new empirical evidence on the economic consequences of the past pandemics in light of the potential impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on productivity.

This paper examines the association between episodes of large fiscal impulses (expansions and adjustments) and sustainable development indicators (prosperity, resilience, and inclusivity). We provide country studies of Chile, Poland, South Africa, and Thailand, examining the components of government expenses and tax revenues, and reporting four stylized patterns from the analysis. (i) Fiscal expansions led to higher growth rates and reduced negative trade-offs, e.g., pollution and poor-health mortalities associated with economic growth. (ii) Fiscal adjustments led to a more inclusive economy, lowered poverty headcounts, improved sanitation, and cleaner technology access. (iii) Fiscal expansions followed an increase in direct taxes (especially corporate taxes) and a decline in social contributions, and preceded a decline in other direct taxes and an increase in wage bills. (iv) Fiscal adjustments followed a decline in other direct taxes and social contributions, an increase in wage bills, and preceded a decline in government consumption expenditure and transfers. In light of these findings, the domestic resource mobilization should consider the time paths of the taxes and expenditure components to understand their empirical linkages with the sustainable development outcomes in the respective countries. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors are our focus. We ask what were the factors that are associated with the structure of the fiscal programs that governments chose to adopt in the early stage of the pandemic in 2020. We answer this question using details about the fiscal programs that were announced by 98 governments in the first six months of the pandemic, together with a large set of explanatory variables. Maybe not surprisingly, we find that politics played a very significant part in determining the size and composition of these fiscal programs. Governments and societies that are less polarized and more capable were able to mobilise more fiscal resources. We also find that it was governments with bigger debt loads that announced bigger programs, but that sovereign spreads were not so clearly associated with the size of these program plans. There is a limit, however, to what we can glean from these cross-country comparisons. Ultimately, the understanding of the politics and political-economy considerations that led to the specific content of each fiscal program will have to rely on information about the actual deliberations in each government’s halls of power, should these ever become public.

Can bad news about COVID-19 induce negative expectations on sovereign credit risks? We investigate the factors driving credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging market sovereigns around the outbreak of COVID-19. Using 2014–2019 data, we estimate a two-factor model of global and regional risks and then extrapolate the model-implied spreads for the period July 2019–June 2020. Intriguingly, the model initially predicts the realized spreads well but loses predictive accuracy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fiscal space and oil-revenue dependence primarily drive the differences between the realized and predicted sovereign spreads. Our augmented-factor model indicates that the cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate growth is positively associated with the CDS spreads. The evidence suggests that the epidemiological deterioration can lower confidence in the sovereign credit markets due to the prospects of prolonged lockdowns and a slower GDP growth recovery. Our results also hold for a single regression of daily spread changes during 2014–2020.

We compare the importance of market factors against that of COVID-19 dynamics and policy responses in explaining Eurozone sovereign spreads. First, we estimate a multifactor model for changes in credit default swap (CDS) spreads over January 2014 - June 2019. Then, we apply a synthetic control-type procedure to extrapolate model-implied changes in the CDS. The factor model does very well over the rest of 2019 but breaks down during the pandemic, especially during March 2020 when there is a large divergence between the actual and model-implied CDS changes. We find that the March 2020 divergence is well accounted for by COVID-specific risks and associated policies, mortality outcomes, and policy announcements, rather than traditional determinants. Daily CDS widening ceased almost immediately after the ECB announced the PEPP, but the divergence between actual and model-implied changes persisted. This points to COVID-19 Dominance: widening spreads during the pandemic has led to unconventional monetary policies that primarily aim to mitigate short-run fears, temporarily pushing away concerns over fiscal risk.

We analyze the sovereign bond issuance data of eight major emerging markets (EMs) - Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Turkey from 1970 to 2018. Our analysis suggests that (i) EM local currency bonds tend to be smaller in size, shorter in maturity, or lower in coupon rate than foreign currency bonds; (ii) EMs are more likely to issue local-currency sovereign bonds if their currencies appreciated before the global financial crisis of 2008 (GFC); (iii) inflation-targeting policy increases the likelihood of issuing local-currency debt before GFC but not after; and (iv) EMs that offer higher sovereign yields are more likely to issue local-currency bonds after GFC. Future data will allow us to test and identify structural changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath.

We take stock of and compare tax revenue trends in Latin America and Asia. The tax revenues to GDP ratios increased significantly in both regions in the 2000s, although they remain visibly below Eu...

Economic integration has brought about not only benefits and opportunities but also required adjustment, especially for the youth entering the labour force. The lower growth rates characterizing the post Global Financial Crisis era and the concerns about income inequality put to the fore the degree that better targeted investment in human capital may ameliorate the challenges facing the working poor. Using cross-country data, we find the association between the income shares of the working poor, dependence on manufacturing sector, and the availability of vocational education. Conditioning on tertiary educational attainment, improved access to better vocational education will probably contribute more than large increase in regular college attainment. Comparing the US to Germany suggests that pushing more students to BA granting colleges may no longer be the most efficient way to deal with the challenges caused by the decline in manufacturing employment affecting in particular lower-income households. We also note that a tracking of technical training and educational budget, shown in the case of Vietnam in comparison to Thailand, as well as government subsidies for reskilling of labour fource throughout their career in Singapore, is a potential explanation for their relative manufacturing competitiveness.

The global financial crisis of 2007–09 has increased the attention of policymakers and academics on the scale and operation of interconnected financial systems, especially on what has become known as ‘too big to fail’ in the global financial system, including both bank and nonbanks. In this chapter, we study the systemic risk of the mutual fund sector in the global financial system. More specifically, this chapter provides new evidence of systemic risk contribution in the international mutual fund sector from 2000 to 2011. The empirical analysis tracks the systemic risk of 10,570 mutual funds investing internationally. The main findings suggest that the systemic risk contributions of international mutual funds are more than proportional given the fund’s size. Policy implications are discussed in terms of practicality of regulation, macroprudential approach, and risk-taking behaviour of fund managers.

The paper compares fiscal cyclicality across regions and countries from 1960 to 2016. It finds that more than half of 170 countries analyzed in seven regions had, in more recent years, limited fiscal space, and that their fiscal policy was either cyclical or procyclical. This was particularly apparent since the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, which was marked by increased procyclical government spending when accounting for net acquisition of nonfinancial assets and capital expenditure. We construct a limited-fiscal-capacity statistic, measured by public debt–average tax revenue ratio and its volatility, which is found to be positively associated with fiscal procyclicality. The cyclicality is asymmetric: on average, a more indebted government (relative to the tax base) spends more in good times and cuts back spending indifferently compared with low-debt countries in bad times. Having sovereign wealth funds is also associated with larger countercyclicality. An enduring interest rate rise entails diminished fiscal space—a 10% increase in the public debt–tax base ratio is associated with an upper bound of a 5.6% increase in government-spending procyclicality.

This paper outlines a tractable cost-benefit analysis of the buffer stock financial services provided by international reserves and applies it to 8 of the largest Emerging Markets (BRICS, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey) during 2000-2019. The efficient management of international reserves generates sizable benefits for countries characterized by hard-currency external debt. These benefits increase with the volatility of the real exchange rates and sovereign spreads. While the first-best policy calls for prudential regulations, counter-cyclical management of hoarding reserves in good times and selling them in bad times provides buffers stock financial services adding up to about 3% of GDP during our sample period.

Can bad news about COVID-19 induce negative expectations on sovereign credit risks? We investigate the factors driving credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging market sovereigns around the outbreak of COVID-19. Using 2014-2019 data, we estimate a two-factor model of global and regional risks and then extrapolate the model-implied spreads for the period July 2019-June 2020. Intriguingly, the model initially predicts the realized spreads well but loses predictive accuracy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fiscal space and oil-revenue dependence primarily drive the differences between the realized and predicted sovereign spreads. Our augmented-factor model indicates that the cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate growth is positively associated with the CDS spreads. The evidence suggests that the epidemiological deterioration can lower confidence in the sovereign credit markets due to the prospects of prolonged lockdowns and a slower GDP growth recovery. Our results also hold for a single regression of daily spread changes during 2014-2020.

Countries have significantly increased their public-sector borrowing since the Global Financial Crisis. As a consequence, monetary authorities may face pressure to deviate from their policy targets in ways designed to ease the debt burden. In view of this consideration, we test for greater fiscal dominance over 2000-2017 under Inflation Targeting (IT) and non-IT regimes. We find that evidence of fiscal dominance varies across countries and debt configurations. Higher ratios of public debt-to-GDP may appear associated with lower policy interest rates in advanced economies. However, a declining natural rate of interest largely explains the pattern of lower rates and higher debt in these countries. The most robust evidence of fiscal dominance lies among emerging markets under non-IT regimes, composed mostly of exchange rate targeters. For these countries, policy interest rates are non-linearly associated with public debt levels, depending on both the level of hard-currency public debt-to-GDP and the currency composition of public debt. We also show that emerging market economies with greater exchange rate volatility, inflation volatility, and underlying commodity exposure exhibit stronger associations between public debt and policy interest rates.

We empirically assess the relative importance of various economic fundamentals in accounting for the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging markets during 2004–2012, which encompasses the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Inflation, state fragility, external debt and commodity terms of trade volatility were positively associated, while trade openness and a more favourable fiscal balance/GDP ratio were negatively associated with sovereign CDS spreads. Yet the relative importance of economic fundamentals in the pricing of sovereign risk varies over time. The key factors are trade openness and state fragility in the pre‐crisis period, the external debt/GDP ratio and inflation in the crisis period, and inflation and the public debt/GDP ratio in the post‐crisis period. Asian countries enjoy lower sovereign spreads than Latin American countries, and this gap widened during and after the crisis. Trade openness was the biggest factor behind Asia's lower sovereign spreads before the crisis, and inflation during and after the crisis. The results imply that external factors were paramount in pricing sovereign risk prior to the crisis, but internal factors associated with the capacity to adjust to adverse shocks gained prominence during and after the crisis.

We analyze the financial constraint—export relationship in a framework that is consistent with stylized features of data. The analysis accounts for whether firms need loans or have sufficient capital, and studies the use of bank loans (quantity of finance) and availability of overdraft facilities (flexibility of finance). We develop a two-stage estimation procedure that uses an equation of bank financing in the first stage and an export equation in the second. We find that export participation (extensive margin) and the share of exports in total sales (intensive margin) increase with the availability of overdraft facilities, particularly so for SMEs with loan needs. The percentage of foreign ownership, ISO certification, and operation in manufacturing sector are also significant and positively associated with a firm’s export participation and firm’s share of exports in total sales. The main results are robust to a battery of econometric specifications and statistical tests applied on the firm-level data from our sample countries. The finding of a large economic significance of the overdraft facility variable is consistent with a growing concern from SMEs that the regulatory response to the Global Financial Crisis has forced banks to tighten risk management, thereby raising the rejection rates of overdraft and loan applications from SMEs. For SMEs in developing countries and emerging markets, the improvement of alternative financing forms and supportive government interventions has become ever more challenging.

The global crisis highlights the continued vulnerability of developing countries to shocks from advanced economies. Just a few years after the global crisis, the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has emerged as the single biggest threat to the global outlook. In this paper, we apply the event study methodology to gauge the scope for financial contagion from the EU to developing countries. More specifically, we estimate the responsiveness of equity and bond markets in developing countries to global crisis period and eurozone crisis news. Overall, we find that whereas global crisis period had a consistently negative effect on returns of equity and bond markets in developing countries, the effect of eurozone crisis news was more mixed and limited.

Our analysis shows that the associations of growth level, growth volatility, shocks, institutions, and macroeconomic fundamentals have changed in important ways after the 2008 global financial crisis. Economic growth across countries has become more dependent on external factors, including global growth, global oil prices, and global financial volatility. After accounting for the effects global shocks, we find that several factors facilitate adjustment to shocks in middle-income countries. Educational attainment, share of manufacturing output in gross domestic product, and exchange rate stability increase the level of economic growth; although, exchange rate flexibility, education attainment, and lack of political polarization reduce the volatility of economic growth.

We explore the stability of the conditioning variables accounting for the real estate valuation before and after the crisis of 2008–9, in a panel of 36 countries, recognizing the crisis break. We validate the robustness of the association between the real estate valuation and lagged current account patterns, both before and after the crisis. The most economically significant variable in accounting for real estate valuation changes turned out to be the lagged real estate valuation appreciation (real estate inflation minus CPI inflation), followed by lagged declines of the current account/GDP, lagged domestic credit/GDP growth, and lagged equity market valuation appreciation (equity market appreciation minus CPI inflation). A one standard deviation increase in lagged real estate appreciation is associated with a 10% increase in the present real estate appreciation, larger than the impact of a one standard deviation deterioration in the lagged current account/GDP (5%) and of the lagged domestic credit/GDP growth (3%). The results are supportive of both current account and credit growth channels, with the momentum channels playing the most important role. Smaller current account/GDP surpluses or larger deficits may serve as warning signals, especially when coinciding with credit expansion and real estate appreciation during the past several quarters.

This study analyses the co-movements of net foreign asset accumulation, consumption, real exchange rate, and real interest rate in a cross section of countries. Our sample covers both industrial and developing economies, spanning 1981–2010 period. We find that the accumulation of net foreign assets is associated with increasing consumption and real exchange rate appreciation. In a cross section of countries, when a country increases its net foreign assets to GDP ratio by a one-standard deviation, consumption to GDP increases by 0.02% per year and real exchange rate appreciates by 2% per year. Consumption to GDP responds more positively to net foreign asset accumulation in G7 countries, +0.1 to +0.2% per year, while the response is smaller and negative in developing countries reporting a −0.02% per year. The real exchange rate appreciation, however, is about +3% per year in developing countries and only about +0.2% per year in OECD countries.

Driven by the increasingly important role of supply chains in global production, this paper studies empirical association between global credit‐market shocks and firm behaviour towards liquidity needs across countries and industries. Focusing on the adjustment of working‐capital financing, we find two pieces of supporting evidence from international firm‐level panel data covering the period 2002:I–2012:IV . First, for industries where specific investment in the input supplier–customer relationship is large, firms are more exposed to credit‐market shocks. We find that measures of global credit‐market shocks are negatively associated with trade receivables, trade payables and inventories, conditional on the level of contract intensity in the industries where firms operate. Second, firms in emerging markets are more vulnerable to credit‐market shocks than are firms in developed countries. We are also able to verify the economic significance of sales growth, operating cash flows, cash stock and firm size in the overall adjustment. Our findings highlight the importance of balance‐sheet contagion along supply chains during the 2007–09 global financial crisis.

This paper studies the association between trade reform, growth, and trade adjustment assistance in a sample of developing countries that underwent trade reforms during 1987–2004. Our analysis explicitly differentiates between a group of countries that received trade adjustment loans from the World Bank and a non-recipient group. The results suggest that trade adjustment assistance is positively associated with economic growth after trade reform in the medium to long run. In comparison to a pre-reform period and to the non-recipient group, the recipient countries registered 0.2 percent higher growth of real GDP per capita, 5.0 percent higher import growth, and 2.5 percent higher export growth over a period of three to five years after trade reform.