infonet-economy

Desde principios del 2000, muchos países latinoamericanos alcanzaron un notable crecimiento económico acompañado de la reducción de la pobreza y la desigualdad, debido en gran parte a la persistente aplicación del patrón secular de exportación de materias primas. El fin del superciclo de los precios de los las materias primas en 2014 puso en riesgo algunas de estas ganancias en...

The Swiss Federal government finances are in an excellent shape: debt is small (and decreasing), and carries a low interest rate. This paper reviews the prospects for the Swiss finances drawing on the recent literature. We argue that the current policy of running surpluses and paying down the debt is inefficient, and propose three alternatives. First, as the interest rate on the debt...

The online trading platform Alibaba provides financial technology (FinTech) credit for millions of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Using an internal credit score threshold that governs the allocation of credit, we apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to explore the causal effect of credit access on firm volatility. We find that credit access significantly...

The ECB might seem to be the most independent central bank in the world. Its statutes were carefully designed to ensure independence and they are enshrined in an international treaty. Yet, while serving many governments may be a protection, it can also act as a constraint on policy decisions. This essay explains how the ECB has faced limits during the Eurozone crisis. First, it had...

An ongoing active debate considers the role of the Global Financial Cycle (GFC) in driving international capital flows - especially in emerging economies - as well as the policy options available to absorb their impact. We make two contributions to the debate. First, we rely on a structural measure of the GFC developed in a companion paper to identify episodes of large capital flows...

The sharp declines in oil prices starting in late 2014 sparked a debate about their effect on inflation and the world economy (e.g. GEP January 2015). The decline in oil prices lowered inflation in the short run and in some cases pushed some economies that already experience very low inflation into deflation. More surprisingly, data from the US, Euro area, UK and Israel shows that...