Band 15, Heft 3 -

This paper examines short-run determinants of the Indonesian rupiah/USD exchange rate based on a simultaneous-equation model. Based on a reduced form equation and the EGARCH method, the paper finds that the IDR/USD exchange rate is positively associated with the real 10-year U.S. government bond yield, real GDP in Indonesia, the stock price in the U.S. and the expected exchange rate and negatively influenced by the real deposit rate in Indonesia, real GDP in the U.S., and the stock price in Indonesia. The Asian financial crisis has shifted the mean exchange rate by 4,900.857.

In this paper, we identify the fundamental determinants of the long-run exchange rate in South Africa. We then estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate for this country using a dataset covering the period 1975–2012. In order to account for possible short-run fluctuations in the real exchange rate, we conducted a cointegration test using the ARDL bounds testing procedure. First, we found terms of trade, trade openness, government consumption, net foreign assets and real commodity prices to be the long-run determinants of the real exchange rate in South Africa. Second, we found that nearly 68.06% of the real exchange-rate disequilibrium is corrected annually. Overall, the estimated equilibrium rate indicates that the Rand has been depreciating in real terms over the years. Tightening trade openness is not an option, given international agreements; on the other hand, terms of trade and real commodity prices are determined by the world market. The obvious policy alternative is for South Africa to increase government spending and moderately decrease her net foreign asset position.

This paper analyses firm’s decision to export and the geographical orientation of manufacturing firms in selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. It uses a dataset collected by Rankin, Söderbom, and Teal (2006) on manufacturing firms in Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania Nigeria and South Africa over the period 1991–2004. The paper develops a multinomial choice model of export destination in which profit maximizing firms choose between selling only on domestic market, export only to another African country, and export only outside Africa or export to both destinations. The model is estimated using a multinomial logistic regression. The paper finds evidence of a positive effect of firm size and firm efficiency on export decision and its geographical orientation, especially for the decision to export outside Africa. There is also significant industry, country and time effects in explaining export orientation. Unlike many previous studies, this paper finds that foreign ownership does not substantially determine firm decision to export. Using non-parametric regression, the paper finds that there is a lot of heterogeneity in the relation between the explanatory variables and the propensity to export or to export to various geographical destinations.

The article explores the effects of financial depth and market structure on banking stability for 24 advanced economies and 18 emerging economies over the period of 2003–2010. We examine how commonality in banking stability varies from emerging markets to advanced nations. Our findings suggest possible explanations for what affects the banking stability with economic transitions on the dynamics evolving from emerging to advanced economies.

This study examines the effects of international trade and investment on output and tests the null hypothesis of Granger non-causality among trade, investment and economic growth in Canada. The long-run model is estimated using several single-equation and system estimators to assess the robustness of results across methodologies. The single-equation, OLSEG, GMM, DOLS, NLLS and FMOLS, estimates of the model provide consistent support for the positive and significant long-run effects of exports and investment on output. The ML system estimates cross-validate the cointegrating relationship and reinforce the positive effects of exports and investment and the negative effects of imports on output. The over-parameterized level-VAR estimates suggest unidirectional Granger-causality from exports, imports and investment each to output. The estimates of the model with structural breaks support the long-run relationship, though the evidence is not unambiguous ubiquitously across all the tests. The evidence supporting the positive and significant long-run effects overwhelms the evidence providing weak or no support for the effects of trade on output. The results underline the need for the acceleration of exports (and investment) to offset the demand-reducing effects of imports and escalate the altitudes of output and economic growth.

This paper seeks to find whether the shift in the production structure away from agriculture to services is only the result of the change in income status or the changing economic relations among countries has any important role to play here. It tries to find out the factors responsible for the huge expansion of the services output in recent times (1971–2009) considering three different samples (a) a group of developed and developing countries, (b) a group of developing countries, in particular and also (c) the case of India. The paper finds that along with the variables representing changing income status and technological development, policy changes related to globalization and liberalisation are also important but these policy variables can not explain the shift in the output share of the service sector in the 1990s.

As a member of OPEC, Iran is a nation that is dependent on petrodollars. More specifically, roughly 80 percent of total export earnings in Iran are generated from oil revenue. This in fact is one of the attributes of many developing countries in that their exports are concentrated in either one or a small number of primary products that contribute to the bulk of their foreign exchange revenues. Export instability occurs because export earnings tend to fluctuate annually to a greater extent for developing countries than for advanced countries. The factors that give rise to export instability can be classified as price variability and a high degree of commodity concentration. To date, no study has examined the impact of export instability in the highly oil-dependent Iran. This study develops a model and employs a forty-year annual time series data set to estimate the impact of commodity concentration and price variability in Iran. The estimation results obtained from the time-series model developed in this study does not support the conventional argument, regarding the positive correlation between commodity concentration and export instability. It also shows that fluctuations in petroleum export revenues have significant impact on total export earnings instability in Iran.