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Working Paper
The new regionalism and Asia: impact and options
New regional initiatives abound, both outside Asia and within. Free Trade Areas in the West - notably NAFTA, its possible enlargement into an FTA of the Americas, and the European Union - have implications for Asia. Asian manufacturers will experience trade diversion, especially in textiles and apparel. Balancing such losses is the likelihood of gains from higher import demand caused by stronger economic growth in the Americas and Europe. ; New estimates of the gravity model of bilateral trade confirm the presence of implicit or de facto trade blocs in Asia and the Pacific, as in Europe ...
Working Paper
China's foreign trade reform, 1979-91
Working Paper
Monetary policy in a changing financial environment: searching for an efficient monetary policy framework in Korea
This paper reviews how the changing financial environment in Korea has affected the conduct of monetary policy and examines the extent to which the Bank of Korea now uses the short-term interest rate rather than money aggregates as an operating target. Empirical results from estimation of monetary reaction functions suggest that the Bank of Korea has been following an interest rate target recently, even though it has not explicitly admitted to doing so. The paper also discusses how the conduct of monetary policy can be further enhanced by reforming the call money market and developing the ...
Working Paper
Monetary regime choices for a semi-open country
Working Paper
On the won and other East Asian currencies
A sticky price monetary model (Frankel, 1979) of exchange rates is applied to quarterly data on seven currencies: the Indonesian rupiah, Korean won, Malaysian ringgit, Philippine peso, Singapore dollar, Taiwanese dollar and the Thai baht. The model proves empirically unsuccessful, except in the case of the baht, and to a lesser extent, the Singapore dollar. A monetary model, augmented by the relative price of nontradables, is developed. This relative price variable proxies for the Balassa-Samuelson effect in East Asian real exchange rates identified in Chinn (1997b). The Korean won is best ...
Working Paper
Price level versus inflation rate targets in an open economy with overlapping wage contracts
The standard result in models of sticky prices is that an inflation rate target is better than a price level target at minimizing the variance of real output. This paper provides a contradictory result: a price level target may be preferred in an economy that is characterized by flexible prices in one sector and sticky prices in another sector. An example is a highly open economy that has flexible prices in the tradeable goods sector and sticky prices (due to Taylor-type overlapping wage contracts) in the non-tradeable goods sector. The robustness of these results is confirmed for variants ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate instability: determinants and predictability
The paper is concerned with exchange rate instability, by which we mean large changes in exchange rates. The paper has two objectives. First, we search for plausible determinants of currency crashes. To do this we examine annual panel data for a large sample of developing countries. The work is non-structural, taking the form of probit regressions which link currency crashes to a variety of candidate causes. We examine a comprehensive set of both foreign and domestic explanatory variables. The list includes: foreign conditions; the vulnerability of the country to a crash; the level of ...