Ales Bulir

Income Inequality: Does Inflation Matter?

This paper contributes to the income inequality literature that is based on the traditional Kuznets model. Level of development, state employment, fiscal redistribution, and price stability are found to improve income inequality in a given country. The positive impact of price stability on income distribution is nonlinear The reduction in inflation from hyperinflationary levels significantly lowers income inequality, while further reduction toward a very low level of inflation seems to bring about negligible additional gains in the Gini coefficient.

Managing financial crises: the experience in East Asia

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 was one of the most dramatic economic events of recent times, which raised many questions regarding the appropriate policy response to financial crises. This paper reviews the experience of this crisis, focusing on the overall strategy of crisis management and the way that strategy was implemented, including with regard to official and private financing, structural reforms, and monetary and fiscal policies.

How Volatile and Unpredictable Are Aid Flows, and What Are the Policy Implications?

This paper examines empirical evidence on the volatility and uncertainty of aid flows, and the main policy implications. Aid is found to be more volatile than fiscal revenues - particularly in highly aid-dependent countries - and mildly pro-cyclical in relation to activity in the recipient country. These findings imply that the current pattern of aid disbursements is welfare reducing. We also find that uncertainty about aid disbursements is large and that the information content of commitments made by donors is either very small or statistically insignificant. Policies to cope with these features of aid, as well as broader international efforts to reduce the volatility and pro-cyclicality of aid, are briefly discussed.

Aid and Fiscal Management

This paper focuses on the macroeconomic aspects of fiscal management in aid-receiving countries. Despite the declining share of aid in budgets of donor countries, aid continues to play an important role in many developing countries. The paper first discusses the implications of aid in the economy as a whole and highlights the possibility of Dutch-disease effects of aid. Second, it discusses the implications of aid for short-term fiscal policy management - in particular, how actual or anticipated changes in aid receipts should be reflected in government spending.

Inflation and Income Distribution; Further Evidenceon Empirical Links

This paper examines the effects of inflation and associated financial instability on income distribution. Using both pooled cross country and single country time series models, the level of inflation, inflation variability, and the variability of the nominal exchange rate are shown to impact negatively on overall income equality. Looking at disaggregate measures of income distribution, the issue as to whether inflation is a progressive or regressive tax is found to be negatively correlated with the level of development and the sophistication of the financial structure. The paper argues that these results point towards financial variables as a partial way of rectifying the generally poor explanatory power of both cross-country and time series models of income distribution.

What Explains Private Saving in Mexico

This paper examines the factors influencing Mexicos private saving rate. Cross-country analysis finds that Mexicos private saving is somewhat higher than could be explained by its fundamentals, but lower than in the average country in the sample. This analysis suggests that Mexicos greater reliance on external saving, its relatively high population dependency ratio, and its less developed financial system have been the main factors holding back private saving. Time-series analysis finds that movements in private saving have not been associated with similar shifts in investment, as changes in public saving and external saving have tended to offset movements in private saving. This is consistent with the direction of causality being from investment to saving and suggests that policy measures should focus on creating conditions favorable to increased investment.

The Price Incentive to Smuggle and the Cocoa Supply in Ghana, 1950-96

From the early 1960s to the early 1980s, the officially recorded production of cocoa in Ghana declined by 60 percent. During the 1983–95 Economic Recovery Program, however, cocoa production doubled. Although these developments have inspired much empirical research, most of the studies have been unable to explain the medium-term persistence of cocoa output to remain below its estimated capacity level. The paper argues that the price incentive to smuggle can explain as much as one-half of the observed decline in output and the subsequent recovery. A cointegration analysis and a dynamic error-correction model of cocoa supply support the analysis.

Inflation Targeting and Communication: It Pays Off to Read Inflation Reports

Inflation-targeting central banks have a respectable track record at explaining their policy actions and corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule and an assessment of inflation reports, we provide a new methodology for the empirical evaluation of consistency in central bank communication. We find that the three communication tools-inflation targets, inflation forecasts, and verbal assessments of inflation factors contained in quarterly inflation reports-provided a consistent message in five out of six observations in our 2000-05 sample of Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Thailand, and Sweden.

Taylor Rule Under Financial Instability

This paper contributes to the analysis of monetary policy in the face of financial instability. In particular, we extend the standard new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices to include a financial system. Our simulations suggest that if financial instability affects output and inflation with a lag and if the central bank has privileged information about credit risk, monetary policy that responds instantly to increased credit risk can trade off more output and inflation instability today for a faster return to the trend than a policy that follows the simple Taylor rule with only the contemporaneous output gap and inflation.

Striving to Be 'Clearly Open' and 'Crystal Clear': Monetary Policy Communication of the CNB

The Czech National Bank has a respectable track record in terms of its policy actions and the corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule, we find that its main communication tools-inflation targets, inflation forecasts, verbal assessments of the inflation risks contained in quarterly inflation reports, and the voting within the CNB Board-provided a clear message in about three out of every four observations in our 2001- 2005 sample.