Constant Lonkeng Ngouana

Macroeconomic Management When Policy Space is Constrained; A Comprehensive, Consistent and Coordinated Approach to Economic Policy

The recovery in GDP growth since the global financial crisis has been halting and weak. Concern is widespread that countercyclical policies have run out of space or lack the power to raise growth or deal with the next negative shock. This note argues that room exists for effective policies and that it should be used if appropriate. The most promising route involves a comprehensive, consistent, and coordinated approach to policy making. Comprehensive policy actions within a country exploit synergies, making the whole greater than the sum of parts. Consistent policy frameworks anchor long-term expectations while allowing decisive short- to medium-term accommodation whenever necessary. Coordinated policies across major economies amplify the helpful effects of individual policy actions through positive cross-border spillovers. The findings of this paper indicate that policy coordination adds particular value if the current approach falls short of reviving growth, or in the event of a further downward shock.

Reflating Japan; Time to Get Unconventional?

Japan has ambitious economic goals: 3 percent nominal growth; 2 percent inflation; and a primary budget surplus. Abenomics has employed the three arrows of monetary, fiscal and structural policies, but the goals remain out of reach. We propose that countercyclical measures be embedded in long-run frameworks that anchor expectations for inflation and public debt. In addition, we argue for an incomes policy to assist reflation. Model simulations suggest that, combined, these proposals would make headway towards the goals, with, on balance, a better chance of success than the more unconventional policy alternatives proposed by Krugman, Svensson, and Turner from a risk-return perspective.

(Not) Dancing Together; Monetary Policy Stance and the Government Spending Multiplier

This paper provides estimates of the government spending multiplier over the monetary policy cycle. We identify government spending shocks as forecast errors of the growth rate of government spending from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and from the Greenbook record. The state of monetary policy is inferred from the deviation of the U.S. Fed funds rate from the target rate, using a smooth transition function. Applying the local projections method to quarterly U.S. data, we find that the federal government spending multiplier is substantially higher under accommodative than non-accommodative monetary policy. Our estimations also suggest that federal government spending may crowd-in or crowd-out private consumption, depending on the extent of monetary policy accommodation. The latter result reconciles — in a unified framework — apparently contradictory findings in the literature. We discuss the implications of our findings for the ongoing normalization of monetary conditions in advanced economies.

Household Production, Services and Monetary Policy

A distinctive feature of market-provided services is that some of them have close substitutes at home. Households may therefore switch between consuming home and market services in response to changes in the real wage - the opportunity cost of working at home - and changes in the price of market services. In order to analyze and quantify the implications of this trade-off for monetary policy, I embed a household sector into an otherwise standard sticky price DSGE model, which I calibrate to the U.S. economy. The results of the model are twofold. At the sectoral level, household production augments the service sectors New Keynesian Phillips curve with a sizable extra component that co-moves negatively with the output gap term, lowering the incentive of service sector firms to change their prices. This mechanism endogenously amplifies the real effects of a monetary shock in that sector, unlike in the nondurable goods sector for which households cannot manufacture substitutes at home. At the aggregate level, household production also implies more sluggish prices and a stronger response of real macroeconomic variables to a monetary shock. Some empirical support for this theory is provided.

Global Monetary Tightening: Emerging Markets Debt Dynamics and Fiscal Crises

This paper finds that tightening global financial conditions can worsen emerging economies’ public debt dynamics through an increasing interest rate-growth differential, particularly if coupled with high global risk aversion. Latin America and emerging Europe are the regions most likely to be adversely affected. In addition, historical evidence — analyzed by means of a Poisson count model — suggests that the frequency of sovereign debt crises increases in emerging economies at the early stage of U.S. monetary tightening cycles, at times in which the term spread also rises. The timing may be related to abrupt switches of expectations about the future course of policy in the early stages of tightening cycles.

Energy Subsidies and Public Social Spending: Theory and Evidence

This paper shows that high energy subsidies and low public social spending can emerge as an equilibrium outcome of a political game between the elite and the middle-class when the provision of public goods is subject to bottlenecks, reflecting weak domestic institutions. We test this and other predictions of our model using a large cross-section of emerging markets and low-income countries. The main empirical challenge is that subsidies and social spending could be jointly determined (e.g., at the time of the budget), leading to a simultaneity bias in OLS estimates. To address this concern, we adopt an identification strategy whereby subsidies in a given country are instrumented by the level of subsidies in neighboring countries. Our Instrumental Variable (IV) estimations suggest that public expenditures in education and health were on average lower by 0.6 percentage point of GDP in countries where energy subsidies were 1 percentage point of GDP higher. Moreover, we find that the crowding-out was stronger in the presence of weak domestic institutions, narrow fiscal space, and among the net oil importers.

Structural Transformation and the Volatility of Aggregate Output in OECD Countries

This paper finds a negative relationship between the employment share of the service sector and the volatility of aggregate output in the OECD—after controlling for the level of financial development. This result reflects volatility differentials across sectors: labor productivity is more volatile in agriculture and manufacturing than in services. Aggregate output would therefore become less volatile as labor moves away from agriculture and manufacturing and toward the service sector. I examine the quantitative role of these labor shifts—termed structural transformation—on the volatility of aggregate output in OECD countries. I first calibrate to the U.S. economy an indivisible labor model in which the reallocation of labor across sectors emerges endogenously from sectoral labor productivity growth differentials. The setup is then used to generate the time path of labor shares in agriculture, manufacturing and services in individual countries. Finally, I perform a set of counterfactual analyzes in which the reallocation of labor across sectors is constrained endogenously. I find that the secular shift of labor towards the service sector was volatility-reducing in OECD countries during 1970–2006.