INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC POLICY最新文献

The emerging market economies (EMEs) are experiencing significant financial distress due to the rapid accumulation of foreign currency-denominated debt in recent years. We develop the foreign exposure indicators such as original sin and currency mismatches using a novel data set. Our computations suggest that Latin American economies suffer from the original sin problem, followed by Central European countries. We find a higher degree of currency mismatches in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Poland, Mexico, and Turkey. The resurgence of currency mismatches and the Covid-19 pandemic is a stress test for monetary policy frameworks. We find that country's size, inflation volatility, and exchange rate depreciation cause currency mismatches. We show that the currency mismatch and original sin problem are lower in countries following de-dollarization policies such as limiting debt exposure, effective monetary and fiscal policies, better institutional quality, and export openness. The EMEs need to adopt policies to control currency mismatches, which are consistent with their growth-oriented policies. We suggest the independence of monetary policy, the implementation of macroprudential policies, and the development of offshore bond markets in a local currency. These policies control currency mismatches without changing the growth orientation of the EMEs. South Africa, Hungary, and Asian economies hold lessons for EMEs in controlling currency mismatches.

This paper analyses quarterly estimates of productivity growth at industry level for three advanced economies, France, the UK and the US, for 2020. We use detailed industry-level data to distinguish reallocations of working hours between industries from pure within-industry productivity gains or losses. We find that all three countries showed positive growth rates of aggregate output per hour in 2020 over 2019. However, after removing the effects from the reallocation of hours between low and high productivity industries, only the US still performed positively in terms of within-industry productivity growth. In contrast, the two European economies showed negative within-industry productivity growth rates in 2020. While above-average digital-intensive industries outperformed below-average ones in both France and the UK, the US showed higher productivity growth in both groups compared to the European countries. Industries with medium-intensive levels of shares of employees working from home prior to the pandemic made larger productivity gains in 2020 than industries with the highest pre-pandemic work-from-home shares. Overall, after taking into account the productivity collapse in the hospitality and culture sector during 2020, productivity growth shows no clear deviation from the slowing pre-pandemic productivity trend. Future trends in productivity growth will depend on whether the favourable productivity gains (or smaller losses) in industries with above-average digital intensity will outweigh negative effects from the pandemic, in particular scarring effects on labour markets and business dynamics.

This paper characterises the conventional and the digital sector of the EU economy since the late 90s and introduces a two sector growth model which highlights structural differences between the two sectors. In contrast to conventional goods and services, digital goods and services are more easily scalable but require more upfront intangible investment. These features require consideration of fixed costs and a departure from perfect competition and raise issues about market entry. Another important dimension is the skill demand of both sectors, with the latter requiring a larger share of workers with digital skills. Since COVID-19 is expected to induce a persistent increase of demand for digital services, we use this model to estimate the likely economic impacts. We are in particular interested how the digital transition is affecting the labour market and the functional distribution of income. The paper shows how the distribution of economic rents between workers with digital skills and platforms is determined by labour supply conditions and entry barriers. This suggests that there is a role for competition policy and labour market policies to support the digital transition.