Aggregation Consumption And Trade

In this testament to the distinguished career of H.S. Houthakker a number of Professor Houthakker's friends, former colleagues and former students offer essays which build upon and extend his many contributions to economics in aggregation, consumption, growth and trade. Among the many distinguished contributors are Paul Samuelson, Werner Hildenbrand, John Muellbauer and Lester Telser. The book also includes four previously unpublished papers and notes by its distinguished dedicatee.

In this testament to the distinguished career of H.S. Houthakker a number of Professor Houthakker's friends, former colleagues and former students offer essays which build upon and extend his many contributions to economics in aggregation, consumption, growth and trade. Among the many distinguished contributors are Paul Samuelson, Werner Hildenbrand, John Muellbauer and Lester Telser. The book also includes four previously unpublished papers and notes by its distinguished dedicatee.

We develop a new Measure of Aggregate Trade Restrictions (MATR) using data from the IMF’s Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions. MATR is an empirical measure of how restrictive official government policy is towards the international flow of goods and services. MATR is simple, ad hoc, plausible, quantitative, easily updated, based solely on policy-relevant measures of trade policy, and covers an unbalanced sample of up to 157 countries annually between 1949 and 2019. MATR is strongly correlated with, but more comprehensive than, existing measures of openness and trade policy existing measures. We use MATR to show that trade restrictions are harmful for the economy and lead to significant contractions in output.

Aggregation lies at the heart of macroeconomics. Economists using such aggregates as capital, investment, labor, and even output or GNP assume that such constructions have a sound analytic foundation. The question of the existence of aggregate production functions is not only part of the foundation of macroeconomic theory and policy but also played a central role in the "Cambridge vs. Cambridge" debate, which challenged long-held assumptions about the foundations of neoclassical microeconomics. In this third collection of his essays Franklin M. Fisher settles the question of the conditions for the existence of aggregate production functions. He examines the conditions for approximate aggregation and, through simulation experiments, considers why aggregate production functions appear to work in practice. He also explores related topics involving price aggregation and aggregation in international trade.

In September 2001, staff from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met with the objective of strengthening collaboration between the two organizations in projects of civil service reform. This strengthened collaboration will have key benefits in ensuring consistency between the conflicting goals of the two organizations, establishing realistic objectives within the reform process, and maintaining a core set of wage and employment data. The principal conclusion arrived at was that World Bank and IMF staff should be engaging in collaboration earlier in the reform process. To guide the collaboration, six foundations were identified. These include: develop a medium-term fiscal framework; foster national ownership by making reforms politically feasible; focus and streamline conditionality; agree on sequencing and timing of reforms; and strengthen data collection. These principals will be tested for effectiveness in several focus countries.

This paper examines the relationship between terms of trade shocks, private saving, and the current account position. The relationship between these variables is theoretically ambiguous: an adverse transitory terms of trade shock can either induce a deterioration or an improvement in the current account, depending on whether the resulting income effects are greater or less than the resulting substitution effects. The substitution effects involve both intertemporally substituting consumption and intratemporally substituting consumption between importables and nontradables. The relative strength of these substitution effects is estimated using data for five OECD countries during 1970/95; both are found to exert large and significant effects on the current account balance.

This paper uses bilateral data on 420 merchandise trade flows between 21 industrial countries are used to estimate standard trade equations. The data set of over 11,000 observations allows the underlying elasticities to be estimated with considerable precision. Remarkably, a single specification appears to explain behavior across these countries in spite of the large number of individual flows analyzed. The results indicate a powerful long-run effect from supply on exports. Also, the real exchange rate elasticity depends upon the behavior of third country exchange rates. There is evidence of pricing to market and of a J-curve.