Time Consistency Of Optimal Policy In A Small Open Economy

In this book, I characterize conditions under which optimal monetary and fiscal policy is time consistent in a stylized small open economy with a flexible foreign exchange rate regime. I show that these conditions depend on the way in which leisure is assumed to enter preferences and/or on the process which productivity is assumed to follow. I further argue that these conditions will fail to be sufficient if the small open economy implements a fixed foreign exchange rate regime. Thus, in a small open economy with conventional debt instruments and with households who have preference over consumption, leisure, and real money balances, it is impossible to have the following at the same time: perfect capital mobility, a credible fixed exchange rate, and time consistency of optimal fiscal policy. Finally, I discuss how to understand the long-term stability of monetary unions from the time-consistency perspective.

This paper addresses the time-consistency problem of optimal policy when intertemporal prices are inflexible. For small, open economies facing given world interest rates, it shows that a consumption tax, rather than a tax on wage income, is time-consistent under a variety of circumstances, even including some cases where the optimal tax rate is not constant over time. This result, when it applies, restores the neutrality of the term structure of government debt, and reaffirms the tax-smoothing theory of debt determination.

Econometric techniques and models are still being extensively used in the business of forecasting and policy advice. This book presents recent advances in the theory and applications of quantitative economic policy, with particular emphasis on fiscal and monetary policies in a European and global context. The volume honors Andrew Hughes Hallett, a pioneer and major scientist in quantitative economic policy analysis, whose contributors are among his friends and former students.

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco presents the full text of an article entitled "Optimal Simple Targeting Rules for Small Open Economies," by Richard Dennis. The article discusses optimal policy rules in a stylized small open economy model under a spectrum of targeting regimes. Optimal simple rules are rules that exploit a reduced information set.

This paper explores optimal policy design in an estimated model of three small open economies: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Within a class of generalized Taylor rules, we show that to stabilize a weighted objective of output, consumer price inflation and nominal interest variation optimal policy does not respond to the nominal exchange. This is despite the presence of local currency pricing and due, in large part, to observed exchange rate disconnect in these economies. Optimal policies that account for the uncertainty of model estimates, as captured by the parameters' posterior distrbution, similarly exhibit a lack of exchange rate response. In contrast to Brainard (1967), the presence of parameter uncertainty can lead to more or less aggressive policy responses, depending on the model at hand.

Economic Policy in a Demographically Divided World contains the economic analysis of the consequences of demographic change and the diverging population developments in an interdependent world economy in particular. The global divergence in demographic developments gives rise to a myriadof economic and ethical problems. This topic is treated with the help of themathematical apparatus of neoclassical optimal growth models. The author tries to disentangle the basic policy issues of a demographically divided world, such as a selective immigration policy, sustainable patterns of international lending and borrowing, development aid, and dynamic optimal taxation. The most important feature of the book is that it brings together information and theories of fairly recent date to analyse a practical policy problem, viz. issues related to a world economy that is characterised by a demographic division. This stylised fact is hardly given some attention in current economic theory and the book contains with respect to this stylised fact some new results. Customers might benefit from the book by gaining intuition concerning principles of economic policy in a world characterised by demographic change.