Emerging Economy Business Cycles

This paper analyses the extent to which financial integration impacts the manner in which terms of trade affect business cycles in emerging economies. Using a s mall open economy model, we show that as capital account openness increases in an economy that faces trade shocks, business cycle volatility reduces. For an economy with limited financial openness, and a relatively open trade account, a model with exogenous terms of trade shocks is able to replicate the features of the business cycle.

This paper analyses the extent to which financial integration impacts the manner in which terms of trade affect business cycles in emerging economies. Using a s mall open economy model, we show that as capital account openness increases in an economy that faces trade shocks, business cycle volatility reduces. For an economy with limited financial openness, and a relatively open trade account, a model with exogenous terms of trade shocks is able to replicate the features of the business cycle.

This book investigates how global business cycles impact the economies of developing countries. Global business cycles, the wave-like movements of economic expansion followed by contraction in aggregate economic activities, impact all economies comprising the global economy. The patterns being shown in developing countries correspond increasingly to those in the global north, and yet there is a relative dearth of studies exploring whether global business cycles exist and how they operate in developing economies. This book explores how cycles operate at the global and sub-global developing country levels, with a particular focus on the level of development and the structure of the economies. Drawing an important distinction between cycles and fluctuations, the book criticises mainstream conceptualisation and identification of cycle phenomena, and instead proposes an alternative conception and methodology for the identification of cycles. Along the way, the book also delves into the manufacturing and rise of China, and other potential competitors in the industrial arena, as increasingly important drivers of global cycles and global economic growth. This book will be an important read for researchers and upper-level students of development economics and international political economy.

This paper examines how durable goods and financial frictions shape the business cycle of a small open economy subject to shocks to trend and transitory shocks. In the data, nondurable consumption is not as volatile as income for both developed and emerging market economies. The simulation of the model implies that shocks to trend play a less important role than previously documented. Financial frictions improve the ability of the model to match some key business cycle properties of emerging economies. A countercyclical borrowing premium interacts with the nature of durable goods delivering highly volatile consumption and very countercyclical net exports.

We build a small open economy, real business cycle model with labor market frictions to evaluate the role of employment protection in shaping business cycles in emerging economies. The model features matching frictions and an endogenous selection effect by which inefficient jobs are destroyed in recessions. In a quantitative version of the model calibrated to the Mexican economy we find that reducing separation costs to a level consistent with developed economies would reduce output volatility by 15 percent. We also use the model to analyze the Mexican crisis episode of 2008 and conclude that an economy with lower separation costs would have experienced a smaller drop in output and in measured total factor productivity with no significant change in aggregate employment.

Emerging economies are characterized by higher consumption and real wage variability relative to output and a strongly countercyclical current account. A real business cycle model of a small open economy that embeds a Mortensen-Pissarides type of search-matching frictions and countercyclical interest rate shocks can jointly account for these regularities. In the face of countercyclical interest rate shocks, search-matching frictions increase future employment uncertainty, improving workers’ incentive to save and generating a greater response of consumption and the current account. Higher consumption response in turn feeds into larger fluctuations in the workers’ bargaining power while the interest rates shocks lead to variations in the firms’ willingness to hire; both of which contribute to a highly variable real wage.

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups-industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose macroeconomic fluctuations in key macroeconomic aggregates-output, consumption, and investment-into different factors. These are: (i) a global factor, which picks up fluctuations that are common across all variables and countries; (ii) three group-specific factors, which capture fluctuations that are common to all variables and all countries within each group of countries; (iii) country factors, which are common across all aggregates in a given country; and (iv) idiosyncratic factors specific to each time series. Our main result is that, during the period of globalization (1985-2005), there has been some convergence of business cycle fluctuations among the group of industrial economies and among the group of emerging market economies. Surprisingly, there has been a concomitant decline in the relative importance of the global factor. In other words, there is evidence of business cycle convergence within each of these two groups of countries but divergence (or decoupling) between them.