Valentina Flamini's Books

The Unequal Benefits of Fuel Subsidies Revisited

Evidence for Developing Countries

By: Mr.David Coady,Valentina Flamini,Louis Sears

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The Unequal Benefits of Fuel Subsidies Revisited

Evidence for Developing Countries

By: Mr.David Coady,Valentina Flamini,Louis Sears

Understanding who benefits from fuel price subsidies and the welfare impact of increasing fuel prices is key to designing, and gaining public support for, subsidy reform. This paper updates evidence for developing countries on the magnitude of the welfare impact of subsidy reform and its distribution across income groups, incorporating more recent studies and expanding the number of countries. These studies confirm that a very large share of benefits from price subsidies goes to high-income households, further reinforcing existing income inequalities. The results can also help to approximate the welfare impact of subsidy reform for countries where the data necessary for such an analysis is not available.

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International Monetary Fund

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ISBN 10

1513576348

ISBN 13

9781513576343

Credit Cycle and Capital Buffers in Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic

By: Valentina Flamini,Pierluigi Bologna,Fabio Di Vittorio,Rasool Zandvakil

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Credit Cycle and Capital Buffers in Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic

By: Valentina Flamini,Pierluigi Bologna,Fabio Di Vittorio,Rasool Zandvakil

Credit is key to support healthy and sustainable economic growth but excess aggregate credit growth can signal the build-up of imbalances and lead to systemic financial crisis. Hence, monitoring the credit cycle is key to identifying vulnerabilities, particularly in emerging markets, which tend to be more exposed to sudden external shocks and reversal in capital flows. We estimate the credit cycle in Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic and find that the creadit gap is a powerful predictor of systemic vulnerability in the region. We simulate the activation of the Basel III countercyclical capital buffers and discuss the macroprudential policy implications of the results, arguing that countercyclical macroprudential policies based on the credit gap could prove useful to enhance the resilience of the region’s financial sector but the activation of macroprudential instruments should also be informed by the development of other macrofinancial variables and by expert judgment.

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International Monetary Fund

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ISBN 10

1484397991

ISBN 13

9781484397992

The Short-Term Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Markets, Poverty and Inequality in Brazil

By: International Monetary Fund

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The Short-Term Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Markets, Poverty and Inequality in Brazil

By: International Monetary Fund

We document the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Brazilian labor market focusing on employment, wages and hours worked using the nationally representative household surveys PNAD-Continua and PNAD COVID. Sectors most susceptible to the shock because they are more contact-intensive and less teleworkable, such as construction, domestic services and hospitality, suffered large job losses and reductions in hours. Given low income workers experienced the largest decline in earnings, extreme poverty and the Gini coefficient based on labor income increased by around 9.2 and 5 percentage points, respectively, due to the immediate shock. The government’s broad based, temporary Emergency Aid transfer program more than offset the labor income losses for the bottom four deciles, however, such that poverty relative to the pre-COVID baseline fell. At a cost of around 4 percent of GDP in 2020 such support is not fiscally sustainable beyond the short-term and ended in late 2020. The challenge will be to avoid a sharp increase in poverty and inequality if the labor market does not pick up sufficiently fast in 2021.

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International Monetary Fund

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ISBN 10

1513571648

ISBN 13

9781513571645

Doing More with Less: How Can Brazil Foster Development While Pursuing Fiscal Consolidation?

By: Valentina Flamini,Mauricio Soto

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Doing More with Less: How Can Brazil Foster Development While Pursuing Fiscal Consolidation?

By: Valentina Flamini,Mauricio Soto

Following a benchmarking exercise, we estimate the spending required to reach satisfactory progress in the Sustainable Development Goals in the health, education, and infrastructure sectors in Brazil. We find that there is room for savings in education (up to 1.5 percentage point of GDP) and health (up to 2.5 percentage points of GDP) without compromising the quality of services but additional investments for over 3 percent of GDP per year are needed to close large infrastructure gaps in roads, water, and electricity by 2030. Brazil can do more with less, but increasing efficiency of public spending will require substantial reforms.

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International Monetary Fund

Published Date

ISBN 10

1513509357

ISBN 13

9781513509358

Growing Pains

Is Latin America Prepared for Population Aging?

By: Mr.Lorenzo U Figliuoli,Valentina Flamini,Misael Galdamez,Frederic Lambert,Mike Li,Mr.Bogdan Lissovolik,Rosalind Mowatt,Jaume Puig,Mr.Alexander D Klemm,Mauricio Soto,Mr.Saji Thomas,Christoph Freudenberg,Anna Orthofer

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Growing Pains

Is Latin America Prepared for Population Aging?

This paper estimates the fiscal costs of population aging in Latin America and provides policy recommendations on reforms needed to make these costs manageable. Although Latin American societies are still younger than most advanced economies, like other emerging markets the region is already in a process of population aging that is expected to accelerate in the remainder of the century. This will directly affect fiscal sustainability by putting pressure on public pension and health care systems in the region that are already more burdened than, for example, in emerging Asia, a region with a similar demographic structure. A stylized cross-country exercise, drawing on demographic projections from the United Nations and methodologies developed by the IMF to derive public spending projections, is used to quantify long-term fiscal gaps generated by population aging in 18 Latin American countries. Several aspects of current pensions and health care systems in Latin Amer-ica make the region’s long-term fiscal positions particularly vulnerable to population aging.

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195

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International Monetary Fund

Published Date

ISBN 10

1484326105

ISBN 13

9781484326107

Is the Glass Half Empty Or Half Full?

Issues in Managing Water Challenges and Policy Instruments

By: Ms.Kalpana Kochhar,Ms.Catherine A Pattillo,Ms.Yan M Sun,Mrs.Nujin Suphaphiphat,Mr.Andrew J Swiston,Mr.Robert Tchaidze,Mr.Benedict J. Clements,Ms.Stefania Fabrizio,Valentina Flamini,Ms.Laure Redifer,Mr.Harald Finger

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Is the Glass Half Empty Or Half Full?

Issues in Managing Water Challenges and Policy Instruments

This paper examines water challenges, a growing global concern with adverse economic and social consequences, and discusses economic policy instruments. Water subsidies provided through public utilities are estimated at about $456 billion or 0.6 percent of global GDP in 2012. The paper suggests that getting economic incentives right, notably by reforming water pricing, can go a long way towards encouraging more efficient water use and supporting needed investment, while enabling policies that protect the poor. It also discusses pricing reform options and emphasizes an integrated and holistic approach to manage water, going beyond the water sector itself. The IMF can play a helpful role in ensuring that macroeconomic policies are conducive to sound water management.

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International Monetary Fund

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ISBN 10

1484391195

ISBN 13

9781484391198

Monetary Policy and Labor Market Gender Gaps

By: Valentina Flamini,Diego B. P. Gomes,Bihong Huang,Ms. Lisa L Kolovich,Aina Puig,Ms. Aleksandra Zdzienicka

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Monetary Policy and Labor Market Gender Gaps

By: Valentina Flamini,Diego B. P. Gomes,Bihong Huang,Ms. Lisa L Kolovich,Aina Puig,Ms. Aleksandra Zdzienicka

We study the effects of monetary policy shocks on employment gender gaps in a panel of 22 countries using quarterly data from 1990 to 2019. Our results show that men’s employment falls more than women’s after contractionary monetary policy shocks, narrowing the employment gender gap over time. Two factors contribute to explaining this heterogeneous effect. First, a larger impact of monetary policy shocks on employment in the industry sector that employs more men. Second, the larger response of the employment gap in the sector (services) that employs the largest share of men and women. In terms of labor market adjustment, the narrowing of the gender employment gap is initially driven by a reduction in the gender unemployment gaps that, over time, results in an adjustment in the gender labor force participation gap—with men’s labor force participation dropping more than women’s. The effects are larger in countries with more flexible labor market regulations, higher gender wage gaps, and lower informal women’s employment compared to men’s. Finally, the effects are also larger for contractionary monetary policy shocks and during expansions.

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