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This paper examines the recent slowdown in bank lending that has affected several large OECD countries. The analysis begins with a description of the importance of bank credit in the financial systems of the countries considered. The origins of the lending slowdown are analysed - - including the importance of deteriorating bank balance sheets and the BIS capital rules - - as well as its potential to depress economic activity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how monetary policy should react to unusually sluggish bank lending ...
In recent years a greater demand for strengthening the role of the legislature in the budget process has become evident worldwide: more than a quarter of countries have revised their constitutions over the last 15 years to give Parliament more powers. In particular, several African countries are experiencing pressure to increase the legislature’s role in the preparatory stage of the budget process and as a check on the executive. This article argues that there are risks in allowing greater parliamentary activism, but that a greater risk is associated with marginalising the role of Parliament in the budget process. The article sets out options for designing a role for Parliament that allows it sufficient oversight, while managing the risks of ill-disciplined parliamentary action leading to excess spending or of Parliament becoming a conduit for narrow, ineffective spending demands.
This report aims to showcase the value of implementing a Bayesian framework to analyse and report results from international large-scale surveys and provide guidance to users who want to analyse the data using this approach. The motivation for this report stems from the recognition that Bayesian statistical inference is fast becoming a popular methodological framework for the analysis of educational data generally, and large-scale surveys more specifically. The report argues that Bayesian statistical methods can provide a more nuanced analysis of results of policy relevance compared to standard frequentist approaches commonly found in large-scale survey reports. The data utilised for this report comes from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). The report provides steps in implementing a Bayesian analysis and proposes a workflow that can be applied not only to TALIS but to large-scale surveys in general. The report closes with discussion of other Bayesian approaches to international large-scale survey data, in particularly for predictive modelling.
Risk financing is of growing interest to a wide range of development and humanitarian actors searching for solutions to bridge a growing global post-disaster financing gap.
This report describes key features of risk financing and risk transfer, examines some of the current challenges at the contextual and programmatic levels as well as institutional challenges donors might face in engaging in risk financing and recommends a set of principles and policy approaches to guide future donor support and engagement.
Monetary policy affects activity, and ultimately inflation, in a number of ways. The most important of these is generally considered to be through the effect of interest rates directly on the demand for goods by households and firms. However, monetary policy can also influence activity through its impact on the value of assets that, in turn, will influence the behaviour of households and firms; e.g. by changing wealth and, through an impact on balance sheets, borrowing costs. Recent financial market developments may have made these effects of monetary policy more important but at the same time less easy to predict. In particular, the size of financial markets has risen relative to activity and readily tradable assets are becoming increasingly important relative to other financial assets. Prices of such assets tend to be sensitive to shifts in market expectations about the future course of general economic developments and in particular interest rates. With these changing financial ...
Results from this analysis support the rapid in the number of ELIS, especially in the late 1990s and between 2007 and 2010. At the same time, these figures suggest that this growth might have slowed since 2010. The analysis also shows both the diversity and unequal growth of ELIS according to different characteristics. The growth in ELIS appears to be driven by the combination of an increase in the number of “traditional” ELIS, such as single-issue environmental seals, and the emergence of “more recent” types of ELIS, including quantitative reports. This combination highlights the tension between increased competition among similar ELIS, and the emergence of new schemes potentially less exposed to direct competition but facing larger entry challenges. The dataset also shows that the multiplicity of ELIS may not be present for all types of products and environmental areas in all countries.
These findings provide a contextual basis to look at evidence on the potential implications of having a multiplicity of schemes, and analyse the current and possible need for policy responses to identified challenges.
Many African countries are benefiting from reductions in their external debt. One important objective is to redirect the budgetary resources released from servicing external debt towards poverty-reducing expenditures. Several questions arise in this context. First, are the public expenditure management (PEM) systems of African countries robust enough to allow specific povertyreducingexpenditures to be identified in annual budgets and tracked in countries’ accounting systems? Second, does the expenditure control system allow poverty-reducing expenditures to be protected from cuts should there be unforeseen shortfalls in revenues? Third, are internal and external audit mechanisms effective, so as to ensure the integrity of expenditure reports, both in-year and annually? To answer these and other questions, an assessment of the entire PEM system is required in each country. Such a study has already been prepared.1 During 2001, the PEM systems of 24 low-income countries were assessed based on a common set of 15 questions in the areas of budget preparation, budget execution, and fiscal reporting. Figure 1 shows the results for two regions of Africa (Anglophone countries and Francophone countries) – well below what is required to meet the objectives of effective PEM systems (both regions attained only about 40% of the required benchmarks)...
Market Exchange Rates (MER) balance the demand and supply for international currencies, while Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates capture the differences between the cost of a given bundle of goods and services in different countries. When undertaking multi-country analysis of environmental issues (such as climate change) that includes different currencies, a decision has to be made as to whether to use PPP or MER in the analytical framework. The distinction between them is particularly germane in inter-temporal studies that postulate future scenarios. PPPs are generally favoured for their closer link to welfare, but MERS are necessarily the basis of international trade, so it is difficult to choose between them. Some authors have noted some empirical regularity between them and have sought to exploit this to avoid choosing between PPP and MER. In this paper, it is shown that such ad hoc adjustments are not necessary when structural changes are accounted for.
The paper presents the results of the first application of cyclical analysis to economic activity in Serbia. The analysis refers to the period 2001-07, which marked the start of democratic and economic reforms, since short term fluctuations in economic activity prior to 2001 were the result of various exogenous shocks like hyperinflation, wars and international economic sanctions. In the post-reform period, the Serbian economy exhibits characteristics of a small, open, marketoriented economy. Economic activity shows an upward trend, and with special regard to growth dynamics and their cyclical properties, cyclical analysis is relevant. In analysing cyclical fluctuations in economic activity, a deviation-from-trend approach is applied. For dating turning points in economic activity, the monthly gross domestic product (GDP) is used since the coincident properties of the index of industrial production could not be statistically verified for Serbia as there were a small number of quarterly observations available for GDP.