Rob Vos

How China Could Contribute to a Benign Global Rebalancing

Our study shows that China could contribute to an orderly global rebalancing using a package of policies to stimulate its domestic consumption. These policies include a progressive appreciation of the RMB, fiscal stimulation by increasing expenditure on education, health care, social safety nets and poverty reduction, income policies to reduce inequality and to strengthen wage income, and reforms of the financial system to improve financial efficiency and to mitigate financial constraints. By implementing such policies, Chinas external surplus could be narrowed and its domestic imbalances improved. The excessively high savings rate could be lowered and the share of household consumption increased, even though GDP growth would moderate slightly.

Is Latin America’s Rise of the Middle Classes Lasting or Temporary? Evidence from Ecuador

A solid middle class can provide the backbone for more stable societies and sustained welfare. Ecuador’s experience, alike that witnessed elsewhere in LA, has yet to reach that footing. This chapter analyzes the roots of the stark decline of poverty and the commensurate rise of an emerging middle class in Ecuador. These trends happened on the back of a strong rise in real wages and active social policies supported in part by booming international commodity prices. Not being rooted in sustained aggregate productivity growth and structural change towards modern services and industries, the size of the middle class and its welfare are still highly vulnerable to global market volatility.

Liberalizing Trade, and its Impact on Poverty and Inequality in Nicaragua

The Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations stalled in 2008 owing in no small degree to a lack of agreement on the terms of substantially reducing trade-distorting support for agricultural products and to what extent this will be beneficial to developing countries. Nicaragua presents an interesting case in point, being one of the poorest economies in Latin America with still a relatively large agricultural sector and high degrees of rural poverty. In 2005, the country signed a free trade agreement with the United States. This chapter provides a quantitative analysis addressing that question. It does so using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for Nicaragua coupled with a micro-simulation methodology. The first section provides background information on trade reform policies and macroeconomic trends in Nicaragua, with special reference to the agricultural sector and rural poverty. The section that follows describes the main features of the CGE model and the micro-simulation methodology used to assess the impact on poverty and inequality. The author then lay out the model scenarios considered, which include liberalizations of agricultural and all merchandise goods trade by the rest of the world and by Nicaragua itself. That is followed by a summary analysis of results. This analysis includes tests for the sensitivity of the results with respect to assumptions regarding the responsiveness of trade to price liberalization, as identified through the relevant trade elasticities. The final section provides conclusions and possible policy implications.