The Benefits Of International Policy Coordination Revisited

This paper uses two of the IMF’s DSGE models to simulate the benefits of international fiscal and macroprudential policy coordination. The key argument is that these two policies are similar in that, unlike monetary policy, they have long-run effects on the level of GDP that need to be traded off with short-run effects on the volatility of GDP. Furthermore, the short-run effects are potentially much larger than those of conventional monetary policy, especially in the presence of nonlinearities such as the zero interest rate floor, minimum capital adequacy regulations, and lending risk that depends in a convex fashion on loan-to-value ratios. As a consequence we find that coordinated fiscal and/or macroprudential policy measures can have much larger stimulus and spillover effects than what has traditionally been found in the literature on conventional monetary policy.

This paper uses two of the IMF’s DSGE models to simulate the benefits of international fiscal and macroprudential policy coordination. The key argument is that these two policies are similar in that, unlike monetary policy, they have long-run effects on the level of GDP that need to be traded off with short-run effects on the volatility of GDP. Furthermore, the short-run effects are potentially much larger than those of conventional monetary policy, especially in the presence of nonlinearities such as the zero interest rate floor, minimum capital adequacy regulations, and lending risk that depends in a convex fashion on loan-to-value ratios. As a consequence we find that coordinated fiscal and/or macroprudential policy measures can have much larger stimulus and spillover effects than what has traditionally been found in the literature on conventional monetary policy.

The unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) pursued by the advanced economies (AEs) have posed macroeconomic challenges for the emerging market economies (EMEs) through volatile capital flows and exchange rates. AE central banks need to acknowledge and appreciate the spillovers resulting from such UMPs. Central banks of the AEs, who have set up standing mutual swap facilities, should explore similar arrangements with other significant EMEs with appropriate risk mitigation measures. These initiatives could do much to actually curb volatility in global financial markets and hence in capital flows to EMEs, thus obviating the need for defensive policy actions on the part of EMEs.

A critical look at the challenges facing international policy cooperation in the new postcrisis environment. The global financial crisis of 2007–09 highlighted the economic interdependencies between all major countries, raising the issues of international cooperation. Managing Complexity: Economic Policy Cooperation after the Crisis looks at how, following the global financial crisis, countries have changed the way they cooperate with each other on matters of economic policy. In this volume, the result of a joint research project of Chatham House and the International Monetary Fund, researchers and policymakers who were directly involved in the crisis take a critical look at the challenges facing international policy cooperation in the new postcrisis environment and at how the theory and practice of cooperation have evolved as a result of the crisis.

The European experience suggests that the efforts made to achieve an efficient trade-off between monetary policy and prudential supervision ultimately failed. The severity of the global crisis have pushed central banks to explore innovative tools—within or beyond their statutory constraints—capable of restoring the smooth functioning of the financial cycle, including setting macroprudential policy instruments in the regulatory toolkit. But macroprudential and monetary policies, by sharing multiple transmission channels, may interact—and conflict—with each other. Such conflicts may represent not only an economic challenge in the pursuit of price and financial stability, but also a legal uncertainty characterizing the regulatory developments of the EU macroprudential and monetary frameworks. In analyzing the “legal interaction” between the two frameworks in the EU, this book seeks to provide evidence of the inconsistencies associated with the structural separation of macroprudential and monetary frameworks, shedding light upon the legal instruments that could reconcile any potential policy inconsistency.

For a long time, economic research on Africa was not seen as a profitable venture intellectually or professionally-few researchers in top-ranked institutions around the world chose to become experts in the field. This was understandable: the reputation of Africa-centered economic research was not enhanced by the well-known limitations of economic data across the continent. Moreover, development economics itself was not always fashionable, and the broader discipline of economics has had its ups and downs, and has been undergoing a major identity crisis because it failed to predict the Great Recession. Times have changed: many leading researchers-including a few Nobel laureates-have taken the subject of Africa and economics seriously enough to devote their expertise and creativity to it. They have been amply rewarded: the richness, complexities, and subtleties of African societies, civilizations, rationalities, and ways of living, have helped renew the humanities and the social sciences-and economics in particular-to the point that the continent has become the next major intellectual frontier to researchers from around the world. In collecting some of the most authoritative statements about the science of economics and its concepts in the African context, this handbook (the first of two volumes) opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on exciting topics, and in the process challenges and stimulates the quest for knowledge. Wide-ranging in its scope, themes, language, and approaches, this volume explores, examines, and assesses economic thinking on Africa, and Africa's contribution to the discipline. The editors bring a set of powerful resources to this endeavor, most notably a team of internationally-renowned economists whose diverse viewpoints are complemented by the perspectives of philosophers, political scientists, and anthropologists. The set of analyses and reflections presented here try to endow each subject with depth and discovery.

Recently, monetary authorities have increasingly focused on implementing policies to ensure price stability and strengthen central bank independence. Simultaneously, in the fiscal area, market development has allowed public debt managers to focus more on cost minimization. This “divorce” of monetary and debt management functions in no way lessens the need for effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy if overall economic performance is to be optimized and maintained in the long term. This paper analyzes these issues based on a review of the relevant literature and of country experiences from an institutional and operational perspective.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and nowhere is this truer than in the arena of international economic policy cooperation. With the world facing the largest and most synchronized plunge in output of the postwar era, policy makers banded together to find solutions. This paper looks at the lessons from what did—and did not—occur in the area of policy cooperation since the crisis. Outcomes seem to be weaker over time in areas such as macroeconomic policies, where institutional procedures were less well defined and there were disagreements over spillovers. By contrast, cooperation seems to have been most effective where there was a consensus that such policies could avoid the risk of highly detrimental outcomes and institutional arrangements were more concrete. Principle amongst these was trade, but bank capital buffers, IMF resources, and derivatives exchanges also fall into this category. Lessons for those interested in promoting cooperation seems to be: it may be more fruitful to: focus on the potential for major costs from a lack of cooperation, rather than the minor gains from fuller coordination; strive for more consensus estimated spillovers; convince policy-makers costs of loss of cooperation are large; and focus on building better and more enduring institutional arrangements.