ElasticSearch Score: 11.27389
Interest rates in China are composed of a mix of both market-determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (retail lending and deposit rates), reflecting China’s gradual process of interest rate liberalization.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.901465
August 14, 1997
Privatization—the transfer of activities from the public to the private sector—gained international prominence in the 1980s because of the need to reduce budget deficits and growing concerns about the efficiency of state-owned enterprises and government bureaucracies. This article examines privatization in Canada and its effect on governments' fiscal positions.
Privatization has generally been less rapid and extensive in Canada than elsewhere, partly because of the comparatively moderate size of our public sector. Nevertheless, federal, provincial, and municipal governments have increasingly reduced their direct involvement in the Canadian economy by selling Crown corporations, contracting with private firms to deliver public services, and transferring the development of public infrastructure projects to the private sector.
The fiscal impact of privatizing Crown corporations varies with such factors as the profitability of the enterprise, the size of the government's initial investment, and past write-downs. In general, when privatizations are part of a broader effort to improve public finances, they can contribute to fiscal consolidation by reducing budgetary requirements and debt levels.
When services and infrastructure projects are privatized, it is expected that more efficient private sector management will reduce government expenditures. For example, a private consortium may be better able to manage the financial risks involved in building an infrastructure facility, such as cost overruns or the withdrawal of contractors, than the public sector. The key to raising efficiency and lowering costs, however, is competition, not privatization per se. Therefore, the cost savings arising from the privatization of services or public works depend crucially on the terms of the contract.
Overall, when structured to improve economic efficiency, privatization is likely to enhance the economy's performance, thereby producing long-term economic and budgetary gains.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.807726
The author investigates the quantitative importance of the expenditure-switching effect by developing and estimating a structural sticky-price model nesting both producer currency pricing (PCP) and local currency pricing (LCP) settings.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.704331
We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.377273
This paper investigates the impact of exchange rate movements on the conduct of monetary policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We develop and estimate a structural general equilibrium two-sector model with sticky prices and wages and limited exchange rate pass-through.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.287785
We study how different types of monetary policy shape the distributional effects of external economic shocks on households’ consumption in a small open economy. Our results present a trade-off between maintaining overall stabilization and controlling consumption inequality.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.278493
The paper examines how the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis is affected by a modern variation of the standard model that allows product differentiation (within the traded and nontraded goods sectors) with the number of firms determined exogenously or endogenously.
ElasticSearch Score: 9.812567
Carbon dioxide emissions have been commonly modelled as rising and falling with total output. Yet many factors, such as energy-efficiency improvements and shifts to cleaner energy, can break this relationship. We evaluate these factors using US data and find that changes in energy efficiency of consumption goods explain a significant proportion of emissions fluctuations. This finding also implies that models that omit energy efficiency likely overestimate the trade-off between environmental protection and economic performance.
ElasticSearch Score: 9.571641
This paper examines the implications of positive news about future asset values that turn out to be incorrect at a later date in an open economy model with banking. The model captures the patterns of bank credit and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000 and 2010. The model finds that the use of unconventional policies leads to a milder bust.
ElasticSearch Score: 9.487325
Multi-stage production is widely recognized as an important feature of the modern global economy. This feature has been incorporated into many state-of-the-art quantitative trade models, and has been shown to deliver significant additional gains from international trade.