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"Serven, Luis"
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Growth, inequality and poverty: a robust relationship?
The consequences of poverty and inequality for growth have long preoccupied academics and policy-makers. This paper revisits the inequality-growth and poverty-growth links. Using a panel of 158 countries between 1960 and 2010, we find that the correlation of growth with poverty is consistently negative: A 10 p.p. decrease in the headcount poverty rate is associated with a subsequent increase in per capita GDP between 0.5 and 1.2% per year. In contrast, the correlation of growth with inequality is empirically fragile—it can be positive or negative, depending on the empirical specification and econometric approach employed. However, the indirect effect of inequality on growth through its correlation with poverty is robustly negative. Closer inspection shows that these results are driven by the sample observations featuring high poverty rates.
Journal Article
Is infrastructure capital productive? A dynamic heterogeneous approach
This paper offers an evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure. Using a panel time series approach and a large cross-country dataset, the paper estimates a long-run aggregate production function relating gross domestic product to human capital, physical capital, and a synthetic measure of infrastructure comprising transport, power and telecommunications. Tests of the cointegration rank allowing it to vary across countries reveal a common rank with a single cointegrating vector, which we interpret as the long-run production function. Estimation of its parameters is performed using the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator, which allows for unrestricted short-run parameter heterogeneity across countries while imposing the (testable) restriction of long-run parameter homogeneity. The long-run elasticity of output with respect to the synthetic infrastructure index ranges between 0.07 and 0.10. The estimates are highly significant, both statistically and economically, and robust to alternative dynamic specifications and infrastructure measures. Tests of parameter homogeneity fail to yield evidence that the long-run parameters differ across countries.
Journal Article
What Drives Private Saving across the World?
Saving rates display considerable variation across countries and over time. This paper investigates empirically the policy and nonpolicy factors behind these saving disparities using a large, cross-country, time-series data set and following an encompassing approach including a number of relevant private saving determinants. The paper extends the literature in several dimensions. It uses the largest data set on aggregate saving assembled to date and explores both national and private saving determinants. It uses panel instrumental-variable techniques to correct for endogeneity and heterogeneity. Finally, it performs a variety of robustness checks to changes in estimation procedures, data samples, and model specification.
Journal Article
Medium Term Business Cycles in Developing Countries
We study the transmission of business cycle fluctuations for developed (N) to developing economies (S) with a two-country, asymmetric, DSGE model with endogenous development of new technologies in N, and sunk costs of exporting and transferring the production of the intermediate goods to 5. Consistent with the data, the flow of technologies from N to S co-moves positively with output in N and S; shocks to N have a large effect on S; business cycles in N lead over medium term fluctuations in S; the cross-correlation of outputs is larger than consumption; and interest rates in S are countercyclical.
Journal Article
Global Imbalances: Origins and Prospects
This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the origins of global imbalances, their prospects after the global crisis, and their policy implications. A conventional view of global imbalances considers them to primarily result from macroeconomic policies and cyclical forces that cause demand for goods to outstrip supply in the United States and other rich countries and that have the opposite effect in major emerging markets. An alternative view holds that global imbalances are the result of structural distortions and slow-changing factors that primarily affect assets markets. This paper reviews the analytical underpinnings of these two perspectives and the empirical evidence of their respective merits. The paper then assesses the outlook for global imbalances after the crisis, particularly in terms of policy action to reduce their magnitude. Policy intervention is warranted to the extent that the imbalances are driven by welfare-reducing distortions, but in this case, the primary target of policy intervention should be the distortions rather than the imbalances. Finally, the paper examines various forms of international spillovers that may call for multilateral action to limit global imbalances.
Journal Article
Are All the Sacred Cows Dead? Implications of the Financial Crisis for Macro- and Financial Policies
The recent global financial crisis has shaken the confidence of industrial and developing countries alike in the very blueprint of the financial and macropolicies that underlie the Western capitalist systems. In an effort to contain the crisis from spreading, the authorities in the United States and many European governments have taken unprecedented steps of providing extensive liquidity, giving assurances to bank depositors and creditors that include blanket guarantees, structuring bail-out programs that include taking large ownership stakes in financial institutions, and establishing programs for direct provision of credit to nonfinancial institutions. Emphasizing the importance of incentives and tensions between short term and longer term policy responses to crisis management, the authors draw on a large body of research evidence and country experiences to discuss the implications of the current crisis for financial and macroeconomic policies going forward.
Journal Article
Real-Exchange-Rate Uncertainty and Private Investment in LDCS
This paper examines empirically the link between real-exchange-rate uncertainty and private investment in developing countries, using a large cross-country time series data set. The paper builds a GARCH-based measure of real-exchange-rate volatility and finds that it has a strong negative effect on investment, after controlling for other standard investment determinants and taking into account their potential endogeneity. The effect of uncertainty is not uniform, however. There is some evidence of threshold effects, so that uncertainty only matters when it exceeds some critical level. In addition, the negative effect of real-exchange-rate uncertainty on investment is significantly larger in economies that are highly open and in those with less developed financial systems.
Journal Article
COUNTRY PORTFOLIOS
Capital flows to developing countries are small and mostly take the form of loans rather than direct foreign investment. We build a simple model of North–South capital flows that highlights the interplay between diminishing returns, production risk, and sovereign risk. This model generates a set of country portfolios and a world distribution of capital stocks that resemble those in the data. (JEL: F32, F34)
Journal Article
Poverty reduction and growth : virtuous and vicious circles
That raising income levels alleviates poverty, and that economic growth can be more or less effective in doing so, is well known and has received renewed attention in the search for pro-poor growth. What is less well explored is the reverse channel: that poverty may, in fact, be part of the reason for a countrys poor growth performance. This more elabborated view of the development process opens the door to the existence of vicious circles in which low growth results in high poverty and high poverty in turn results in low growth. Poverty Reduction and Growth is about the existence of these vicious circles in Latin America and the Caribbean about the ways and means to convert them into virtuous circles in which poverty reduction and high growth reinforce each other. Through its analysis of fresh data and the attention it pays to issues such as the persistent inequality in the region, the role played by various microdeterminants of income, and the potential existence of human capital underinvestment traps, this title should be a valuable contribution to the current regional debate on poverty and growth, a debate that is critical to the design of policies conducive to enhancing welfare in all is dimensions among the poor of Latin America and the Caribbean.
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