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A Solution to Overoptimistic Forecasts and Fiscal Procyclicality: The Structural Budget Institutions Pioneered by Chile
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Historically, many countries have suffered a pattern of procyclical fiscal policy: spending too much in booms and then forced to cut back in recessions, thereby exacerbating the business cycle. This problem has especially ...
How Can Commodity Exporters Make Fiscal and Monetary Policy Less Procyclical?
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Fiscal and monetary policy each has a role to play in mitigating the volatility that stems from the large trade shocks hitting commodity-exporting countries. All too often macroeconomic policy is procyclical, that is, ...
On Graduation from Fiscal Procyclicality
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)
In the past, industrial countries have tended to pursue countercyclical or, at worst, acyclical fiscal policy. In sharp contrast, emerging and developing countries have followed procyclical fiscal policy, thus exacerbating ...
Over-optimism in Forecasts by Official Budget Agencies and its Implications
(Oxford University Press, 2011)
The paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries. In general, the forecasts are found: (i) to have a positive average bias, (ii) to be more biased ...
Can Leading Indicators Assess Country Vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis
(Elsevier, 2012)
This paper investigates whether leading indicators can help explain the cross-country incidence of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the current crisis, the selection ...
A Lesson From the South for Fiscal Policy in the US and Other Advanced Countries
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
American fiscal policy has been procyclical: Washington wasted the expansion period 2001-2007 by running budget deficits, but by 2011 had come to feel constrained by inherited debt to withdraw fiscal stimulus. Chile has ...
Monetary Policy in Emerging Markets: A Survey
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
The characteristics that distinguish most developing countries, compared to large industrialized countries, include: greater exposure to supply shocks in general and trade volatility in particular, procyclicality of both ...
Environmental Effects of International Trade
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009)
The report surveys the state of our knowledge regarding the effects of trade on the environment. A central question is whether globalization helps or hurts in achieving the best tradeoff between environmental and economic ...
Determinants of Agricultural and Mineral Commodity Prices
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
Prices of most agricultural and mineral commodities rose strongly in the past decade, peaking sharply in 2008. Popular explanations included strong global growth (especially from China and India), easy monetary policy (as ...
A Comparison of Product Price Targeting and Other Monetary Anchor Options, for Commodity Exporters in Latin America
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Seven possible nominal variables are considered as candidates to be the anchor or target for monetary policy. The context is countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which tend to be price takers on world markets, ...