The COVID-19 crisis raises the risk of renewed financial sector pressures in the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) region in the period ahead. Bank distress and its economic and fiscal fallout have been recurring features of many CCA countries, as seen after the global financial crisis and the 2014–15 oil price shock. Strong policy responses have delayed the full impact of the COVID crisis so far, but financial sector risks will increase once public support is phased out. If these risks are not preemptively addressed, banks’ ability to lend during the recovery phase could be impaired and there may be a need for costly public interventions, as in the past.
This paper argues that structural weaknesses may make private investment particularly sensitive to business confidence relative to other traditional investment drivers and global shocks. It gauges the importance of confidence over recent years in selected countries in Central America, including Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Using a vector error correction model to carry out the empirical work, a system representing global activity and the domestic economy, including a set of investment drivers (interest rates, unit labor costs, and confidence) is analyzed. The findings suggest that confidence has been, on average, the most important driver of investment in these countries, exceeded only by global factors. Since confidence, arguably, can be influenced by policymakers’ decisions, structural reforms to improve the business climate and reduce uncertainty play an important role in promoting investment and economic growth.
Developing and low-income economies face the challenge of increasing public spending to address sizeable infrastructure and social gaps while simultaneously restoring the fiscal discipline weakened to countervail the effect of the global recession. Increasing the efficiency of social spending could be the key policy to address the dilemma as it allows the optimization of the existing resources by reducing spending inefficiencies. This paper quantifies the efficiency gap in the health and education sectors for a large sample of developing and emerging countries and proposes measures to reduce these gaps for the specific cases of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
This paper presents estimates of potential output for all Central American economies. Our findings are that potential output growth has declined in recent years in most economies of Central America. Lower capital accumulation and TFP growth are accounting for most of this decline. Apart from Costa Rica, there are no indications of significant economic slack in 2015 in Central America. Looking forward, potential growth in most Central American economies is expected to continue at an average of 4 percent in the medium-term due to structural constraints to capital and employment growth, and low TFP growth. Increasing potential growth, thus, should be a policy priority and structural reforms must be directed at improving business conditions, product and labor markets, and enhancing the capacity for innovation.
To rebuild fiscal buffers after large fiscal responses to successive shocks over 2020-22, France will need to reverse the trend spending increase observed over the last three decades through structural spending reforms. This paper identifies areas where scope for savings or efficiency gains exist based on an evaluation of the level and efficiency of public spending in France relative to European peers, using benchmarking analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to derive efficiency frontiers. Reforming social protection, health, education, and civil service, and rationalizing tax expenditures should preserve or improve outcomes while generating savings that would help meet medium-term adjustment needs.
This paper estimates the neutral interest rate in the Kyrgyz Republic using a range of methodologies. Results indicate that the real neutral rate is about 4 percent based on an average of models and 3.7 percent based on a Quarterly Projection Model. This is higher than in many emerging markets and is likely explained by higher public debt and an elevated risk premium, low creditor rights and contractual enforcement, and low domestic savings. The use of an estimate of the neutral interest rate provides useful guidance to monetary policy and enhances transparency and independence of the central bank. Our estimate provides a quantitative benchmark for the monetary policy stance in the context of a central bank that is building analytical capacity, integrating additional insights in its decision-making process, and working to improve its communication. Strengthening the monetary transmission mechanism will be critical to enhance the effectiveness of monetary policy, including by allowing more exchange rate flexibility to support the transition to a full-fledged inflation targeting regime, and reducing excess liquidity to enhance the credit channel, reducing dollarization and high interest rate spreads that adversely affect the transmission of the policy rate to the economy.
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