C. McDermott

Terms of Trade Shocks and the Current Account: Evidence from Five Industrial Countries

What is the effect of shocks to the terms of trade on a countrys current account position? The Harberger-Laursen-Metzler effect predicts that an adverse shock to the terms of trade will worsen the current account balance; in contrast, the prediction of intertemporal models of the current account is dependent on the duration of the shock. This paper examines several features of the terms of trade series of five OECD countries, and the relationship between terms of trade shocks and the current account balance. Median shocks to the terms of trade are found to be highly persistent, yet with a large transitory component, and to account for only a small share of the variability of current account balances in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In contrast, terms of trade shocks are found to account for a relatively large proportion of the variability of current account balances in Australia and New Zealand.

International Integration of Equity Markets and Contagion Effects

This paper investigates empirically the degree of international integration of industrial and emerging country equity markets. It analyzes two issues: first, the extent to which equity prices have tended to move similarly across countries and regions in the long run; and second, the strength of cross-country “contagion” effects. The paper’s findings suggest that both intra-regional and inter-regional linkages across national equity markets have strengthened in recent years. In addition, using impulse response functions, the paper shows that cross-country contagion effects of country-specific shocks dissipate in a matter of weeks while contagion effects of global shocks take several months to unwind themselves.

Macroeconomic Fluctuations in Developing Countries

This article documents the main stylized features of macroeconomic fluctuations for 12 developing countries. It presents cross-correlations between domestic industrial output and a large group of macroeconomic variables, including fiscal variables, wages, inflation, money, credit, trade, and exchange rates. Also analyzed are the effects of economic conditions in industrial countries on output fluctuations in the sample developing countries. The results point to many similarities between macroeconomic fluctuations in developing and industrial countries (procyclical real wages, countercyclical variation in government expenditures) and some important differences (countercyclical variation the velocity of monetary aggregates). Their robustness is examined using different detrending procedures.