Research

Emerging economies, even those with considerable external debt, hold substantial amounts in foreign exchange (FX) reserves. This paper identifies a distinct channel through which financial market frictions explain why net external debtor economies might prefer maintaining reserves to reducing their external debt. In a small open economy with free capital mobility and financial frictions, the model shows that the central bank optimally maintains FX reserves instead of reducing the economy’s external debt. This is because reserve operations influence the exchange rate; specifically, reserve accumulation depreciates the exchange rate, diluting the real value of existing debt payments and minimizing resource losses. Furthermore, the model shows that the optimal reserve accumulation policy under commitment is time-inconsistent as the central bank faces incentives to mitigate the external debt burden. A time-consistent equilibrium features even greater reserve accumulation. Finally, a quantitative analysis of the model demonstrates that in the presence of volatile capital flows, the economy optimally maintains a portfolio of external debt and foreign reserves with FX interventions stabilizing the exchange rate and smoothing consumption.

This paper examines the macroeconomic cost and implications of transitioning to net zero for a fossil-fuel dependent, small open economy. A net zero target operates as an anticipated negative productivity shock that lowers consumption, raises the current account surplus along the transition path, and has ambiguous effects on the real exchange rate. A transition to net zero appreciates the currency by lowering the import bill for fossil fuels, but depreciates the currency by making domestic tradables more expensive. We calibrate the model to the case ofJapan and find that the transition to net zero lowers consumption by 0.2-2%.

This paper proposes a novel, demand-side explanation for the Penn effect: the observation that richer countries systematically exhibit higher price levels. We develop a general equilibrium model where income-dependent preferences lead more productive countries to produce and consume higher-quality, more resource-intensive non-tradeable goods. Our key result is that this endogenous shift toward producing superior goods, which have higher unit factor requirements, outweighs the standard cost-reducing effects of productivity growth, resulting in higher prices. The model shows that quality upgrading emerges as an equilibrium response to rising incomes and leads to higher non-tradeable prices in richer economies even in the absence of Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) effects. Using Penn World Table data, the model replicates the empirical Penn effect, explaining about 69 percent of cross-country price variation without relying on HBS effects.

This study aims to explore the long-run equilibrium relationship between India’s real exchange rate and sectoral productivity trends using internationally comparable KLEMS databases on productivity for India, China, Euro area, the USA, the UK and Japan. This study uses pooled mean group estimations for panel data suggested by Pesaran et al. (1999). The results find support for an “extended” Balassa–Samuelson (BS) hypothesis which allows labour market frictions that does not allow for wage equalisation between traded and non-traded sectors within a country. This mechanism continues to find some support when we separate out distribution sector that comprises wholesale and retail trade in the domestic services sector. The empirical evidence suggests that India’s real exchange rate is anchored to domestic fundamentals and is closely aligned to its fair value over a medium to long-time horizon.

The persistent variation among Indian states in per-capita value added from manufacturing sector raises the question whether the long-run equilibrium in the manufacturing sector differs across states. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on whether labour disputes in the form of strikes, lockouts, temporary closure etc., have caused any variation in these equilibria for the recent period. Available data suggests that in 9 out of 16 states in our sample, labour disputes have generally reduced between 2001 and 2017, while in others labour disputes mostly characterised as random shocks with little predictability. Our two-stage least squares estimates using states’ election cycles as instrument for the labour disputes suggest that these labour disputes with little persistence did not have much influence over the inter-state differences in the equilibrium capital-labour ratios in “registered” manufacturing units between 2001 and 2017. However, 1 percent increase in labour disputes might be associated with 3.2 percent reduction in total factor productivity for the sector in states where disputes were random events. In the remaining states, where labour disputes have consistently fallen over time, this effect is significantly reduced. Our findings are robust in different sample of firms.