Browse by: "F"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) make up the majority of enterprises in the world, providing employment and contributing significantly to national incomes. Many MSMEs face a number of challenges, including regulatory hurdles and tax burdens, difficulties accessing finance and a lack of general guidance or support. Financial education can be an important tool for helping MSMEs and potential entrepreneurs to obtain access to finance and strengthen money management skills.
This working paper presents the results of a stocktake of 21 economies. It shows that, while some MSMEs have access to education, training or mentoring, in most economies approaches are fragmented and risk missing important groups. Identifying MSMEs as a target group within national strategies for financial education would contribute to addressing some of the challenges they face. This would also underline the importance of measuring levels of financial literacy among MSMEs and help policy makers and stakeholders to evaluate programmes that target this group.
Financial inclusion and women entrepreneurship concern policymakers because of their impact on job creation, economic growth and women empowerment. Women in Mexico do engage in paid work but many of them work in the informal sector because they lack opportunities to work in the formal sector. Moreover, financial exclusion rate in Mexico remains the highest amongst OECD countries, affecting women in particular. This paper uses an individual-based panel dataset over the period 2009-2015 to examine the determinants of women entrepreneurship in Mexico and to determine the relationship between women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion across informal and formal work and across economic sectors. The results suggest that financial inclusion is positively linked with entrepreneurship and it can open up economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs. Various financial access points like banking branches, POS terminals, banking agents, ATMs and microfinance banks can be a gateway to the use of additional financial services which can allow businesses development through access to credit facilities. However, the positive relationship between women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion does not hold for women entrepreneurs working in the informal sector or women working in the commerce sector, highlighting lower entry barriers, including financial, in the informal sector and problems pertaining to financial illiteracy. Results also highlight that the probability of a women being an entrepreneur in the informal sector is higher than in the formal sector. Education, age, income, marital status (married or divorced), and income level at the municipality level are amongst other significant determinants which are positively linked with women entrepreneurship. The results also highlight the existence of gender disparity in the status of entrepreneurship across formal and informal work in Mexico. On average, women are about 56% less likely to be entrepreneurs in the formal sector and 63% more likely to be entrepreneurs in the informal sector, as compared to men, after taking into account other relevant individual and municipality level characteristics that are important in explaining entrepreneurship.
The paper addresses the question of whether financial liberalisation and innovation has significantly altered consumption behaviour by reducing liquidity constraints as capital markets become more flexible. A consumption model in which the permanent income hypothesis and extreme Keynesian consumption functions are nested as special cases is the starting point for this analysis. Estimated values for the sensitivity of consumption to current income for different time periods and for several OECD countries are assessed and compared in the light of various econometric properties, country specific liberalisation measures and a variety of proxies reflecting changing liquidity constraints ...
This paper is one of four in this Working Paper series, focusing on financial liberalisation, along with those by Miller and Weller, Driscoll, and Blundell-Wignall and Browne. It examines the historical volatilities of stock, bond and foreign currency markets over alternative periods differing roughly by the degree of financial innovation and globalisation. It characterises trends in gross volatility, and the degree and manner in which volatility in financial markets has changed, the real economic consequences of transitory periods of excess volatility, and discusses some of the financial policies proposed to limit volatility. The results suggest that the past two decades have coincided with a world-wide increase in the average levels of volatility in stock returns, corporate bond yields and exchange rates, accompanied by a general increase in the strength of the positive correlations among national stock returns and the conditional volatilities of these returns. Evidence suggests ...
This paper is one of four in this Working Paper Series, focusing on financial liberalisation, along with those of Kupiec, Driscoll and Blundell-Wignall and Browne. It surveys recent work, both theoretical and empirical, on the question of market efficiency in various asset markets. A number of studies of behaviour in the foreign exchange market, which provide evidence of departures from efficiency, are described. The paper summarises and discusses the implications of research on the effects of noise trading by "irrational" groups of agents, with particular reference to the stock market. The housing market is also considered as an example where pronounced price "bubbles" have appeared. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential welfare impact of departures from efficiency in the foreign exchange market, where it is argued that the case for some form of intervention is strongest ...
Financial management is a critical capability for governments, enabling them to deliver on their priorities and fulfil promises made to parliament and citizens. Skilled human resources are the foundation of these capabilities. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) “Skills for a high performing civil service” framework identifies professional expertise as one of the three core skill areas that drive public value, together with strategic orientation and innovation. The task of providing the civil service with the right skills to carry out financial management functions has however become more challenging.
Although there is no single yardstick to gauge the degree of integration, there is ample evidence that financial markets in the euro area have some way to go before national demarcation lines will effectively disappear and financial market integration is satisfactory. While there has been a push towards integration from the centre, global developments, such as advances in information technology, falling communication costs and standardisation of products, have been the main drivers, while national policies often acted as an impediment. The integration of financial markets finally became a policy priority with the adoption of the FSAP as part of the Cardiff process launched in 1998. For the European Union to have a fully satisfactory regulatory framework for financial markets in place in 2005, further efforts are needed. This paper takes stock of current developments and proposes a set of further suggestions for policy action ...
The past two decades have seen substantial deregulation in the financial sectors of most OECD countries. The main motivation was to improve efficiency within the financial system, but the macroeconomic implications might go beyond this objective with impacts on the business cycle and the transmission mechanisms of monetary and fiscal policies. More specifically, financial liberalisation and heightened competition in the financial services sector, through a rapid expansion of credit, may have eased the liquidity constraints facing households, thus raising the targeted level of consumption. The objective of this paper is to test whether financial deregulation, through an easing of liquidity constraints, has had an impact on the relationship between consumption and income, and more specifically on the wealth effect. A range of different procedures is used to assess the impact of financial deregulation on global wealth and on its different components (financial, housing and others) ...
There was a sizeable correction in financial markets in February. However, since then all of the reflation trades have returned: equities have recouped their losses to the end of April; bonds yields have fallen and spreads have resumed their narrowing pattern; commodities have rallied along with commodity currencies; and the US dollar is weaker....
Over the summer, financial markets weakened substantially as some of the risks that had built up during a period of easy financing, in particular in the housing market, materialised. Volatility has increased, and while equity markets have regained strength, tensions remain on credit markets....
Most countries give income-tax concessions to older people relative to people of working age. Some treat pension income more favourably than earnings, and most do not levy social security contributions on older people. These policies mean that the direct tax burden of older people is lower than that carried by people of working age. At an income equivalent to economy-wide average earnings, for example, the average tax burden (in the nine countries studied) is ten percentage points lower for pensioners than it is for workers. Therefore differences in taxes between pensioners and workers are an important way in which governments support people during their retirement. This is measured by the effect on net replacement rates: the value of pension benefits for a full-career worker relative to earnings when in work. On average, one fifth of the net replacement rate for a worker on average earnings is due to tax differentials rather than the pension system.
This paper provides the first ...