Portuguese Economic Journal最新文献

This paper aims to analyse the current situation of STRs and their regulation in Spain in order to determine whether the restrictions applied contributed to alleviating the volume of STRs. For this purpose, a database from the experimental statistics on tourist accommodation on houses provided by the National Institute of Statistics of Spain and the regional and municipal regulations on STRs have been used. The upward or downward trends of STRs have been examined and linked to the existing regulation. Then, the municipalities were classified according to the type of regulatory measure: laissez-faire, limitation or prohibition. The trend and the problems linked to STRs lead us to believe that more and more municipalities will opt to regulate the activity, seeking a balance between the economic benefit and the social impact of tourism.

This paper aims to examine the impact of the Russian-Ukraine war on the USD/RUB rate. The outcome reveals that war has severe adverse consequences for the USD/RUB rate. It implies that the exchange rate witnessed rapid depreciation following the outbreak of war in February 2022. The findings suggest a significant deviation from the predicted value and show that the USD/RUB exchange rate consistently remained lower than would have been anticipated in the absence of the conflict. On the other hand, the regression discontinuity method supports the finding that the USD/RUB exchange rate has significantly depreciated after the war. The study indicates that war has increased uncertainty and affects exchange rates, causing a noticeable difference between predicted and actual rates. These findings highlight the significance of contingency planning, efficient disaster management, access to market information, and accurate predictive modeling.

The inflation rate is one key indicator for a group of countries to achieve the harmonization required to establish stable and sustainable monetary integration. However, for the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), despite its ambition to embark on monetary integration for about two decades now, achieving this requirement is still a question of investigation. This study examines the nonlinearity and nonlinear convergence of inflation rates among the WAMZ countries as a way to monetary integration. We use inflation rates from 2000 to 2022 and employ a variety of linear and nonlinear tests (such as the Brock–Dechert–Scheinkman–LeBaron nonlinearity test, the Harvey nonlinearity test, the Dickey–Fuller Generalized Least Squares linear unit root test, the Ng–Perron linear unit root test, the Cuestas–Ordonez nonlinear unit root test, the Park–Shintani nonlinear unit root test, and the Hu–Chen nonlinear unit root test). The findings revealed that the data generating process of inflation in the WAMZ countries is nonlinear and that there is inflation convergence in those countries. This means that the countries share similar long-run inflation and, therefore, meet one key criterion for a group of countries to share a common currency.

Arguing that the litmus test of external debt sustainability should be based on total factor productivity growth instead of mere GDP growth, this study examines the effect of external debt on total factor productivity through technical efficiency change using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis method. To deepen the analysis, the dynamics of technical efficiency, public sector external debt and state ownership are also investigated in this study. The results show that external debt of the private sector increases total factor productivity by improving technical efficiency, whereas the contrary is true with regard to external debt of the public sector. Hence, between the public and private sectors, the latter shows greater efficiency in allocating and using external debt. Nonetheless, the negative impact of public sector external debt on technical efficiency can be mitigated by transferring state-owned assets to the private sector through privatization.

This paper studies the impact on consumption of the exogenous changes in public wages in Portugal during and after the economic and financial assistance program (2011-2014), by exploiting the variability in the size of such changes across municipalities. The initial wage cuts triggered a marked reduction of private consumption, while the reinstatements in the later years gave rise to an increase, albeit of a smaller magnitude. The consumption response was larger for employees with relatively lower wages. Households smoothed the impact on consumption of negative income shocks partly by drawing down their deposits. Consumer credit did not play such a role, as households deleveraged as a response to those negative shocks.

This paper develops a small open economy model with a brown and green industry. Brown firms generate an environmental externality that reduces the utility of domestic households. Firms in both sectors rely on domestic and foreign capital to finance their production. Foreign exchange markets are assumed to be shallow and firms pay a higher return to borrow capital with respect to the exogenous foreign interest rate. This inefficiency contributes to a further decline in welfare. In this framework, the first-best allocation is attained through a tax on the output produced by the polluting sector combined with differentiated capital controls, with a higher tax rate applied to foreign capital inflows in the brown sector and a lower tax rate applied to foreign inflows in green firms. Looking at single policy tools, such differentiated capital controls are preferable to a tax on brown production for moderate values of the environmental externality.

Abstract

Copper is one of the main non-ferrous metals which are closely associated with important industries, such as equipment manufacturing, electrical wiring, and construction; and thus, copper price is becoming an important impact factor on the performance of related economies. This paper aims to develop a hybrid method for forecasting the copper price by combining empirical wavelet transform (EWT), particle swarm optimization (PSO), gravitational search algorithm (GSA) and long short term memory neural network (LSTM), which is denoted as EWT-PSO-GSA-LSTM in this study. The forecasting performance of the proposed hybrid method was verified by time series data of the copper closing price in the London Metal Exchange (LME). The results of this study have shown that the proposed EWT-PSO-GSA-LSTM method outperformed other forecasting methods in terms of several performance criteria, such as the root mean square error (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE), the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and the Diebold–Mariano (DM) test. For the daily copper price time series, the EWT-PSO-GSA-LSTM method had the smallest RMSE, MAE and MAPE values (0.007, 0.013 and 1.358, respectively) compared to LSTM, EWT-LSTM, PSO-LSTM and EWT-PSO-LSTM methods. Furthermore, all the DM values of our proposed method were below -2.61 and the (p) values were smaller than 1%, indicating that the proposed method performed the best in forecasting the copper price at the 99% confidence level. Given the present results, it can be concluded that it is possible to improve the copper price forecasting method by combining the EWT, PSO, GSA and LSTM models.

We adopt a pandemic-macroeconomic model to simulate the macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 on various occupations under both laissez-faire and government lockdown scenarios. We integrate a SIR model of virus transmission into a simplified neoclassical model and categorize occupations into two groups based on their ability to work remotely. Subsequently, we assess the shock impact of the pandemic on GDP, consumption, and working hours of flexible and rigid occupations. We find that these three variables declined during the pandemic, yet the consumption varied among individuals with different health status. The labour market experienced a recession, with workers in flexible occupations experiencing a relatively milder impact compared to those in rigid occupations. A larger proportion of remote work mitigated the recessionary effects, although it accentuated the disparities between occupations' income and working hours. The implementation of lockdown policies detrimentally affects welfare, similar to the pandemic itself, but the impact on flexible and rigid occupations differs from that in a laissez-faire scenario.

The introduction of interest-bearing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) presents central banks with an additional instrument for implementing monetary policy. This article develops a Heterogeneous Agents New Keynesian model, incorporating financial frictions, to investigate the transmission mechanism and wealth distribution effects of digital currency interest rate from two distinct perspectives: (i) the interaction between the central bank and financial intermediaries and (ii) the substitution dynamics between cash and digital currency. By comparing models that include and exclude financial intermediaries, our research uncovers that in a society where CBDC is fully implemented, the reverse actions of financial intermediaries can hinder the efficacy of the central bank’s monetary policy and result in elevated costs associated with policy formulation. Additionally, the leverage effect of financial intermediaries exacerbates wealth inequality and contributes to the expansion of investment, thereby promoting an increase in economic output. Comparing societies where CBDC entirely replaces cash with those where CBDC coexists alongside cash, this paper demonstrates that the presence of cash mitigates significant economic fluctuations triggered by CBDC, while the complete elimination of cash amplifies wealth inequality. Consequently, it is crucial for the central bank to account for the behavior of financial intermediaries when adjusting digital currency interest rate and explore the development of an appropriate interest rate mechanism tailored to digital currency. Simultaneously, maintaining cash circulation for a specific period can act as an economic stabilizer.

This paper investigates the real interest parity hypothesis by testing stationarity of real interest rate differentials for 52 countries with respect to the USA. Taking account of the fact that both asymmetric adjustment and gradual temporary breaks may better characterize the dynamics of real interest rate differentials, we propose a new test that allows for two temporary shifts together with asymmetric adjustment towards the equilibrium. We employ the newly proposed test procedure along with the conventional ADF test as well as nonlinear KSS and OSH tests to examine stationarity of real interest rate differentials. Among the main results, we find that the newly proposed unit root test procedure highly outperforms the existing unit root tests in terms of rejecting the null hypothesis of unit root. Our results suggest that real interest rate differentials can be characterized by a stationary process with asymmetric adjustment around gradual and temporary shifts of mean.