Comments and Discussions : Hitoshi HIRAKAWA

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<p>This thesis investigates the determinants of Taiwan’s import changes and the underlying factors of the decreasing Swedish export to Taiwan between 1994 and 2005.</p><p>The empirical study includes 36 countries from both the Pacific Rim and OECD. Based on a modified gravity model of trade, the regression model aims to examine how GDP growth in the exporting country, exchange rate changes, common language, and membership in APEC affect Taiwan’s import volume. The result shows estimates with expected signs, with 49.8 percent of the vari-ance in Taiwan’s changed import volume explained by the exogenous variables. Exchange rate change and language are statistically significant.</p><p>Data on commodity groups of importance for Sweden and Taiwan are also ex-amined, and they show that Taiwan has changed its import demand and has started to import goods other than those Sweden in previous years strongly exported to Taiwan. Taiwan’s regional trading partners have also gained export shares at the expense of Swedish exports.</p><p>The results are in line with theory and it will be hard for Sweden in the future to compete with the increasing regional trade of East Asia where common lan-guage and culture are of big importance.</p>

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to examine how a depreciation in the exchange rate affects the trade balance in an economy over time. The outcomes of a depreciation are possible to analyze through the J-curve phenomenon that shows the relation between the exchange rate and the trade balance both in the short-run and the long-run. The data used in this thesis cover 39 countries and their quarterly changes in exchange rate between 1982 and 2005. The largest depreciation for each country during these years was detected and is the base for this research. In this thesis, focus is on the trade ratio rather than the trade balance for empirical purposes. The relation between the largest depreciations and its effect on the trade ratio are examined in two sets of regressions. The results show no evidence of a J-curve in neither one of the sets of regressions, even though the trade ratio is positively affected by the depreciation. When testing only for significantly large depreciations in the exchange rate the affect on the trade ratio is stronger, all else equal. According to the findings in this thesis, a depreciation in the real effective exchange rate causes the trade ratio to increase immediately and then decrease over time. The conclusion is that the findings are not in line with the J-curve phenomenon tested for; however, they support standard trade theory with the Marshall-Lerner condition being met i.e. a depreciation in the exchange rate will affect the trade balance positively.</p>

Univ., Diss.--Bern, 2007.

Fluctuation of exchange rate has affected the increasing burden of foreign debt payment in emerging economies. This issue has negatively influenced the economic growth. It has been a severe obstacle considering that governments have to issue public debt denominated in foreign currency to finance the budget deficit. Hence, there is an urgent necessity to implement an efficient public debt management to minimize the exchange rate exposure. This thesis analyses how efficient the foreign debt portfolio management is in the 14 emerging economies under examination in the period of 1990-2013. Panel Dynamic Fixed-effect Estimator and Granger Causality approach are applied to analyze how responsive the currency composition of foreign debt portfolio to the exchange rates movement. The thesis examines the four biggest foreign debt shares that are denominated in US dollar, Euro, British pound, and Japanese yen, and the related exchange rates movement in the economies under consideration. The observation concludes that the foreign debt portfolio management in these emerging economies is not efficient or not optimal. The evidences prove that changes in the exchange rates of Euro, British pound, and Japanese yen relative to US dollar Granger cause changes in respected debt shares. It means that there is no substitution effects from the appreciation of the currencies vis-à-vis the US dollar during the year of observation.

This thesis analyses financial stability in eight members of the Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacific Central Banks (EMEAP) economies. One of the factors that may increase financial imbalances (and hence it affects financial stability of an economy) is the accumulated outstanding debt of the economic agents. For example, the corporate sector’s outstanding debt can negatively affect activity of lenders and hence the capabilities of the economy. Since banks are important financial intermediaries in most financial systems, the financial status of banking sector is also important to analyse financial stability of a country. Macroeconomic conditions and financial system structure are some of the important factors that can affect financial conditions (financial soundness) of banks and hence the banking sector. Financial soundness of banks can secure the stability of the financial system. Chapter 2 shows that financial imbalances that arise from accumulated outstanding debt within the corporate sector have a negative effect on the technical capabilities (total factor productivity) of the economy. Therefore, monetary authority (central bank) should control over the debt level. To address this, chapter 2 focuses on the design of monetary policy rule for a small open economy in the context of a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model. This model is extended to show the effects of financial imbalances on the economy. Real exchange rate is another important factor that affects the firm’s real marginal cost, aggregate supply and aggregate demand as discussed in this chapter. The derived optimal monetary policy rule indicates that the monetary authority responds to financial imbalances through output gap when financial imbalances exist due to accumulated outstanding debt. Moreover, the optimal policy rule shows that the response of the monetary authority to exchange rate movements is indirect, through the domestic inflation and output gap. Chapter 3 describes the effect of the financial system structure on financial stability through investigating the financial soundness of the banking sector. Bank financial soundness is the measure of the stability of the financial system and is defined by return on assets, equity capital-asset ratio and return volatility. The first two items increase financial soundness, whereas return volatility decreases financial soundness of a bank. The structure of the financial system is described as market-based or bank-based. Given interrelations between financial sectors and between economies of the EMEAP countries, chapter 3 uses the global (infinite dimensional) vector autoregressive (VAR) model that has been proposed recently to estimate the generalised impulse responses of financial stability measure. Results show that the market-based financial system can increase financial stability through increasing financial soundness of the banking system. Chapter 4 uses nonperforming loans (NPLs) (as one of the main factors behind Asian financial crisis in 1997/8) to analyse financial soundness of banks. NPLs determine loans default rates that decreases banks’ financial soundness. Chapter 4 tests the resistance of the banking system of the EMEAP countries to large macroeconomic shocks (stresses) in a stress-test framework, computing frequency distributions of default rates in three main macroeconomic scenarios (baseline model, stressed real GDP growth and stressed real interest rate). Default rate indicates the possible loss of banks and hence it is an indicator of credit risk which weakens banks’ financial strength. The stress-test indicates that stressing real GDP growth with negative extreme shocks leads to an increase in frequency of higher default rates (in comparison with the baseline model), whereas positive shock to real interest rate may secure financial stability through increasing the frequency of lower default rates and decreasing frequency of higher default rate.

This dissertation includes three chapters. The first chapter studies the question of whether countries with different fiscal capacity should optimally have different ex-ante minimum bank capital requirements. In an environment with endogenously incomplete markets and overinvestment because of moral hazard and pecuniary externalities, I show that countries with larger fiscal capacity should have lower minimum ex-ante bank capital requirements. I also show that, in addition to the minimum capital requirement, regulators in countries with a concentrated financial sector and large fiscal capacity (which are also countries with strong moral hazard) should impose a limit on the amount of liquidity pledged by financial institutions in a crisis state (for example, restrict the amount of put options/CDS contracts sold by financial institutions). The second chapter studies the welfare implications of a concentrated, imperfectly competitive banking sector, which faces a bank net worth constraint in a small open economy (SOE) environment. There are two standard sources of inefficiency --- pecuniary externalities, which lead to overinvestment, and a standard monopolistic underinvestment force. I show that the optimal policy instruments include subsidies on firm borrowing costs in certain periods and capital account controls in others, which is a good proxy for the behavior of emerging markets. For every country, there exists a financial sector with a particular banking sector concentration, for which the inefficiencies offset each other and no government intervention is required in some periods. Furthermore, this paper documents a novel theoretical result --- the interaction between future binding bank net worth constraints and dynamic (future) underinvestment could lead to ex-ante overinvestment even in economies with a single monopolistic bank where there are no pecuniary externalities. The last third chapter, which is coauthored with Kenneth Rogoff, evaluates a new class of exchange rate forecasting studies, which claim that structural models are getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons. We argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time windows have led many studies to overstate even the relatively thin positive results that have been found. / Economics

The current discussion of Inflation Targeting (IT) in emerging economies deals with the effects that nominal exchange rate movements have on the overall inflation rate. The literature has focused in the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages that IT has with respect to other monetary policy regimes and the relevancy of the nominal exchange rate pass-through effect into inflation. So far none of them have dealt with the differences arising from the policy instruments used to fight off inflationary pressure under an IT regime. The literature on IT for emerging economies can be separated in two categories. In the first category the monetary authority uses interest rate policy as the instrument variable to implement and control the inflation target. The second category illustrates when the monetary authorities use international reserves as the instrument to influence the nominal exchange rate in such a way that the depreciation rate is consistent with the overall inflation target. This dissertation presents a model in which both policy instruments are available to the monetary authority. This model is used to address two questions: i) Is IT better than a monetary rule regime? and ii) Is it better to intervene directly in the foreign exchange market rather than use interest rate policy to control exchange rate pressure on inflation, or are they equivalent? The results show that there are important differences between these choices and the answers to these questions are shock dependent. These differences arise because the intervention needed under IT is accompanied by important output costs or benefits depending on the direction of the shock being analyzed. Regarding the pass-through effect, some studies have shown that the pass-through effect from currency depreciation into inflation has been decreasing and therefore is becoming less of an issue for these countries. The literature has offered different explanations for these declines but so far they have not been directly linked to the adoption of IT. This dissertation shows that lower pass-through levels can be a natural result of fear of floating observed in emerging countries that adopted IT and therefore exchange rate effects on inflation are still relevant.