Dynamic Response To Foreign Transfers And Terms Of Trade Shocks In Open Economies

Both permanent and transitory disturbances can change long- run capacity and output -- although they may have opposite effects on the current account. Liquidity constraints and wage rigidities tend to amplify the cyclical adjustment to external shocks.

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange rate and the terms of trade can move in opposite directions in response to world food price shocks. This exacerbates the policy trade-off between stabilizing output prices vis a vis the real exchange rate, to an extent that depends on risk sharing and the price elasticity of exports. Under perfect risk sharing, targeting the headline CPI welfare-dominates targeting the PPI if the variance of food price shocks is not too small and the export price elasticity is realistically high. In such a case, however, targeting forecast CPI is a superior choice. With incomplete risk sharing, PPI targeting is clearly a winner.

Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.

Of the many direct and indirect methods for road use, the key alternatives for reducing road congestion are (1) cordon pricing using manual tollbooths, (2) supplementary vehicle licensing, (3) automatic vehicle identification, and (4) smart card technology.

Applying Western textbook solutions to the problems of enterprise reform in Eastern Europe is likely to be counterproductive. Policy design must be imaginative and explicitly incorporate the political constraints and incentive problems specific to the region, leading to new approaches to enterprise and banking reform.