Open And Closed Economies

This book compares the experiences of the Philippines and Vietnam to gain insight into how openness to trade and financing can increase prosperity. In contrast, theoretical and empirical work in the 20th and early 21st centuries have returned mixed results regarding this assertion. The book also demonstrates the impracticality of any attempt to pursue prosperity in isolation. Chapter 1 discusses recent data and research on international trade and capital mobility. Chapter 2 describes the economy of Vietnam that has grown rapidly since beginning to open in 1994. Chapter 3 relates the stagnation of the Philippines as it remained closed from 1960 to 1994 and examines the recent rapid growth in spite of the continued relative restrictiveness of Philippine policy. Chapter 4 compares the two experiences and then conjectures about the feasibility of a prosperous autarky. Roderick Macdonald lectures in international business at the International School of Business of the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City. He has published Eurocritical (2018), Southeast Asia and the ASEAN Economic Community (2019), and The Economy and Business Environment of Vietnam (2020) with Palgrave Macmillan since retiring from ESG-UQAM, Canada.

This paper develops a new open economy macro model of optimal monetary for a small open economy. Our main result is that in this model, the optimal policy problem for the small open economy is isomorphic to the closed economy case studied in Clarida, Gali, Gertler (1999). In particular, the optimal policy can be implemented with a Taylor Rule under which the domestic interest rate adjusts to the equilibrium real interest rate and expected inflation in domestic prices.

This book compares the experiences of the Philippines and Vietnam to gain insight into how openness to trade and financing can increase prosperity. In contrast, theoretical and empirical work in the 20th and early 21st centuries have returned mixed results regarding this assertion. The book also demonstrates the impracticality of any attempt to pursue prosperity in isolation. Chapter 1 discusses recent data and research on international trade and capital mobility. Chapter 2 describes the economy of Vietnam that has grown rapidly since beginning to open in 1994. Chapter 3 relates the stagnation of the Philippines as it remained closed from 1960 to 1994 and examines the recent rapid growth in spite of the continued relative restrictiveness of Philippine policy. Chapter 4 compares the two experiences and then conjectures about the feasibility of a prosperous autarky.

China's transformation from a virtually closed economy to a major trading nation is an incredible success story. Since 1979 the country has changed it's policies to promote increased foreign trade and investment, thereby attracting more direct investment to China than to any other developing country in recent years. What brought about this change? How, after thirty years of being walled off form the world economy, did China open its door? This book part of the Integrating National Economies series, tells the story of how China ended it long-held policies of economic isolationism and rejoined the world economy in the decade and a half between 1979 and 1994. It shows how China's transformation into a world trading power was achieved remarkably without any major alteration in the country's communist political system. Susan L. Shirk describes the reform strategy and explains why such a turn-around was possible in China but not in the Soviet Union. Shirk's analysis details the political logic behind the economic reform, illustrating how China's leaders were able to win support for reform politics among Communist Party and government officials. Despite strong vested interest in the status quo, the communist government successfully adopted reforms through gradualism, administrative decentralization, and ad hoc particularistic negotiating with individual subordinates. Shirk explains these distinctive features of China's path to reform. China has achieved shallow integration with great success. Whether deeper integration with the world economy will automatically follow remains unclear. Shirk concludes that China will not be able to achieve reform in the areas of deep integration—intellectual property rights, environmental protection, and labor treatment—in the same way it achieved shallow integration. She argues that imposing international standards will require rapid enforcement, central regulation, and uniform rules. If China can meet these challe

The large aggregates in the economy - consumption, investment, production of the domestic and the international sectors, international capital flows, financial accumulation and indebtedness - are analysed in this book as problems in time-optimisation for enterprises and households. The effects of fiscal and monetary policies along with exchange-rate variation are examined, and their simultaneous use for stabilizing demand are found to be necessary. All household decisions on consumptions, savings, and financial disposition are conditioned by uncertainty, and similarly for firms, who make more complex simultaneous decisions on production, real investment, financing, and market strategy. The marginal efficiency-of-investment function derived from these decisions is fundamentally different from the marginal productivity of capital in the neoclassical sense. An economy which grows through the accumulation of capital, increase in labor supply, and technological progress is the framework in which all of these variables move. This codetermines the allocation of factors between domestic and international production, and the development of foreign trade. The growth both of the public debt and of international investment are treated in depth.

This paper studies the fiscal multiplier using a small-open-economy DSGE model enriched with financial frictions. It shows that the multiplier is large when frictions are present in domestic and international financial markets. The reason is that in the model government bonds are more liquid than private financial assets and that entrepreneurs face liquidity constraints. A bond-financed fiscal expansion eases these constraints and stimulates investment and hence growth. This mechanism, however, breaks down under the assumption of perfect international capital mobility, suggesting that conventional models which ignore the presence of frictions in international capital markets tend to underestimate the fiscal multiplier.

The integration of market economies is one of the most remarkable features of international economics, which has important implications for macroeconomic performance in open economies. Equally important is the declining relevance of the real versus the monetary theory dichotomy. These papers focus on those aspects of monetary policy which relate to credibility and non-neutrality; the domestic adjustment to foreign shocks; the interdependence of open economies and their strategic interactions. An important section is also devoted to the innovative modelling of exchange rate dynamics.

Financially closed economies insure themselves against current-account shocks using international reserves. We characterize the optimal management of reserves using an open-economy model of precautionary savings and emphasize several results. First, the welfare-based opportunity cost of reserves differs from the measures often used by practitioners. Second, under plausible calibrations the model is consistent with the rule of thumb that reserves should be close to three months of imports. Third, simple linear rules can capture most of the welfare gains from optimal reserve management. Fourth, policymakers should place more emphasis on how to use reserves in response to shocks than on the reserve target itself.