Leading Indicators Of Country Risk And Currency Crisis

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The banking and currency crises of the last two decades inflicted substantial financial, economic, and social damage on the countries in which they originated. In this work, the efficiency of early warning indicators for these disastrous economic events is evaluated. An analysis of the traditional and recent literature on currency crises is performed in order to extract potential early warning indicators that are suggested by theory. Alongside others, these candidate indicators are tested in alternative empirical studies that are reviewed in this work. The results are mixed, but somewhat encouraging for further research in this field. Furthermore, the analysis is extended to a critique of systems of early warning indicators currently used by international institutions. Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: 1.Introduction1 2.The Currency Crisis Literature as a Reference Point for the Identification of Early Warning Indicators4 2.1The Traditional Theory5 2.2Second Generation Models11 2.3A Cross-generation Framework Proposition19 2.4Early Warning Indicators as Suggested by Theory22 3.The Empirical Assessment of Early Warning Indicators24 3.1Univariate Indicators for Financial Crises24 3.1.1Cross-Country Regressions26 3.1.2Multivariate Probit Models35 3.1.3The Signals Approach40 3.2Composite Leading Indicators for Financial Crises48 4.A Critique of Early Warning Indicators Used in Practice53 5.Conclusion64 Appendix68 Bibliography69

This paper examines the empirical evidence on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behavior in the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold value, this is interpreted as a warning “signal” that a currency crisis may take place within the following 24 months. The variables that have the best track record within this approach include exports, deviations of the real exchange rate from trend, the ratio of broad money to gross international reserves, output, and equity prices.

Financial crises have become relatively frequent events since the beginning of the 1980s. They have taken three main forms: currency crises, banking crises, or both - so called twin crises. As the number of developed economies, developing countries, and economies in transition experienced severe financial crashes researchers are trying to propose a framework for systemic analyses. That is why attempts to advance the understanding of features leading to the outbreak of financial crisis as well as the reasons of vulnerability have become more and more important. In recent years a number of efforts have been undertaken to identify variables that act as early warning signals for crises. The purpose of this paper is to provide some perspective on the issue of early warning signals of vulnerability to currency crises. In particular, it is aimed at presenting and highlighting the main findings of theoretical literature in this area. An effective warning system should consider a broad variety of indicators, as currency crises seem to be usually associated with multiple economic and sometimes political problems. Indicators that have proven to be particularly useful in anticipating crises and received empirical support include the development of international reserves, real exchange rate, domestic credit, credit to the public sector, domestic inflation, and structure and financing of public debt. Other indicators that have found support are trade balance, export performance, money growth, M2/international reserves ratio, foreign interest rates, real GDP growth, and fiscal deficit. Many of the proposed leading indicators have been able to predict particular crises, however, only few have showed ability to do so consistently. Generally, economic models can be said to be more successful in predicting crises that erupt because of weak fundamentals, which make country vulnerable to adverse shocks. They are less likely in anticipating crises due to selffulfilling expectations or pure contagion effects. So far economists are only able to identify situations in which an economy could face the risk of a financial crisis. This is most because of the well-known fact that if we knew the crisis would have already occurred. Warning indicators seem to be unlikely to predict crises in precise way but their analyses can provide extended information about impending problems what enables to take preventive measures.

Assessing country risk is a core component of surveillance at the IMF. It is conducted through a comprehensive architecture, covering both bilateral and multilateral dimensions. This note describes some of the approaches used internally by Fund staff to examine a wide array of systemic risks across advanced, emerging, and low-income economies. It provides a high-level view of the theory and methodologies employed, with an on-line companion guide providing more technical details of implementation. The guide will be updated as Fund staff’s methodologies for assessing country risk continue to evolve with experience and feedback. While the results of these approaches are not published by the IMF for market sensitivity reasons, they inform risk assessments featured in bilateral surveillance as well as in the IMF’s flagship publications on global surveillance.

The global economy has experienced four waves of rapid debt accumulation over the past 50 years. The first three debt waves ended with financial crises in many emerging market and developing economies. During the current wave, which started in 2010, the increase in debt in these economies has already been larger, faster, and broader-based than in the previous three waves. Current low interest rates mitigate some of the risks associated with high debt. However, emerging market and developing economies are also confronted by weak growth prospects, mounting vulnerabilities, and elevated global risks. A menu of policy options is available to reduce the likelihood that the current debt wave will end in crisis and, if crises do take place, will alleviate their impact.

Following the severe financial crises of the 1990s, identifying and assessing financial sector vulnerabilities has become a key priority of the international community. The costly disruptions in global markets underscored the need to establish a set of monitorable variables for evaluating strengths and weaknesses in financial institutions and to alert authorities of impending problems. These variables, indicators, of financial system health and stability known collectively as macroprudential indicators, are the subject of this Occasional Paper by the Monetary and Exchange Affairs Department and the Statistics Department. Macroprudential indicators take measures at both the level of aggregated financial institutions and at the macroeconomic level; financial crises often occur when weaknesses are identified in both. The authors provide a breakdown and explanations of these indicators and a review of the theoretical and empirical work done thus far. Work at other international and multilateral institutions is included as well as the experiences of several national central banks and supervisory agencies. This paper provides a valuable reference source of current knowledge about macroprudential indicators and issues related to their analysis, identification, measurement, and possible dissemination.

The October 2019 Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) identifies the current key vulnerabilities in the global financial system as the rise in corporate debt burdens, increasing holdings of riskier and more illiquid assets by institutional investors, and growing reliance on external borrowing by emerging and frontier market economies. The report proposes that policymakers mitigate these risks through stricter supervisory and macroprudential oversight of firms, strengthened oversight and disclosure for institutional investors, and the implementation of prudent sovereign debt management practices and frameworks for emerging and frontier market economies.