Using a polynomial cointegration technique, this paper shows that the bilateral US current account balance with China has a U-shaped relationship with the life expectancy gap between the US and China. A narrowing gap initially increases the US deficit with China, but eventually, this increased US deficit falls with the further catching-up of Chinese life expectancy. The life expectancy gap between the two countries has been below the threshold level since 2013, and this demographic trend has the potential to improve the US deficit with China. This U-shaped relationship can be theoretically reproduced. A two-country overlapping generations model indicates that the effect of life expectancy is decomposed into four components: retirement savings, social security burden, the number of elderly workers, and the productivity of elderly workers. The total effect of foreign life expectancy on the home current account balance exhibits a sign change in the catching-up of foreign life expectancy.

The Latin American debt crisis consumed the 1980s and was not restricted to Latin America. Starting from the August 1982 Mexican weekend, the crisis had three phases: Concerted Lending (1982-5), Baker Plan (1985-9) and Brady Plan (1989 to mid 1990s). This article describes the evolution of the debt strategy and the road to embracing debt write-downs at the end of the decade. In the absence of an external coordinating mechanism, four groups of parties had to reach agreement on any change in the strategy: the borrowing countries, their commercial bank lenders, the home-country authorities of those lenders, and the International Monetary Fund as the principal international institution. Each group could effectively veto any change in the strategy. This need for consensus is lesson number one from the 1980s for today. Lesson number two is that political economy aspects dictated that the strategy be implemented on a case-by-case basis. The article concludes with an application of these lessons to a similar, but even more global, potential debt crisis in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

This article offers a Japanese perspective on the debate about the international financial system immediately after the first oil shock of 1973–4. Using archival records from the OECD and Bank of Japan, I analyze the three key policy issues discussed at the meetings of Working Party 3 (WP3) of the OECD: petrodollar recycling, balance-of-payments adjustments, and the management of global growth. Documents show that the Japanese approach to capital controls, exchange rate management, state-led growth orientation and international banking strategies was rather strengthened by the impact of the oil shock. By 1975 the OECD viewed Japan, together with Germany and the United States, as one of the ‘locomotives’ that would trigger a revival of economic growth in the industrialized West.

This paper analyses the mechanisms through which capital flows produced financial instability in Spain over a 165-year period. We study why and how capital bonanzas make crises more likely and severe, and whether their incidence varies depending on types of crises (currency, banking and debt crises). We conclude that most of them occurred in different monetary policy regimes, but they were associated with capital bonanzas in a liberal regulatory framework, both of which contributed to a higher likelihood and greater severity of crises. The analysis of the different monetary policy regimes, financial structures and the types of crises allows us to draw some policy implications that emphasise the need for sound financial regulation and supervision.

We analyse the possible optimality of the path followed by the current account of the Spanish economy over a very long period of almost 170 years (1850-2016), according to the intertemporal approach to the current account and using a present-value model. In particular, from the estimation of a bivariate vector autoregression model for the current account, we attempt to assess the extent to which the latter has been used to smooth private consumption over time in the presence of temporary shocks that the economy might suffer. In general, evidence does not seem to be particularly favourable to the validity of the model over the period of analysis.

The Institute has long examined overseas developments in order to understand better domestic macroeconomic dynamics. The organising principle for much of the postwar period was simply the impact on net trade with an implicit view on whether the exchange rate was at an appropriate level and, as such, the external sector was viewed as a constraint on domestic activity. Increasingly integrated factor markets in the modern era of globalisation means that the overseas sector plays a fundamental role in the evolution of both aggregate demand and supply in the UK economy and it is increasingly hard to disentangle the overseas from the domestic sectors. It is not so much that we should reverse this integration but more how to design policy to limit any undesirable consequences on regional and income distribution, as well as aggregate fluctuations in activity.

This paper reviews the impact of financial globalisation on credit dynamics. In particular, it argues that financial globalisation fundamentally alters credit demand and credit supply, since borrowers and lenders have foreign options as well as domestic options in terms of the selection of projects and funding sources. The rapid accumulation of large cross-border debt positions was a central feature in the boom phase of the European credit cycle during 2003–8 and has influenced the nature of the post-2008 financial crisis. Finally, the paper considers the range of policy reforms needed to improve macro-financial stability under international financial integration.

Spain’s financial position during the late 19th and early 20th centuries has usually been presented as one of persistent deficit on current account, which resulted from her integration into international commodity and factor markets and this, in turn, slowed down the growth of the economy. In this essay a preliminary reconstruction of the balance of payments on current account allows us to reject this view. In fact, a net capital inflow made possible to meet the demand for investment-boosting economic performance. Current account reversals in a context of macroeconomic domestic imperfections help to explain the economic slowdown at the turn of the century.

Using a two–country DGSE combining nominal rigidities and financial frictions, we show that the persistence of output and inflation asymmetries observed since 1999 in an increasingly integrated EMU is not necessarily puzzling. Only the integration of intermediate goods markets unambiguously leads to a reduction of asymmetries while the integration of finals goods markets and the integration of financial markets increase the dispersion of inflation rates and business cycles. The result builds on the intensive use of financial markets, i.e. the current account, to adjust externally and smooth the consequences of asymmetric shocks. This mechanism implies a disconnection of country-level outputs and/or inflation rates to ensure that agents return to their initial asset position in the long run.

As the tenth anniversary of EMU is approaching, a debate is underway as to whether the single currency has promoted or hindered convergence among the countries of the Euro Area. On the one hand, there is wide agreement that asymmetric shocks have subsided after the creation of the single currency, but if one moves to examine the catching-up process between the more and less affluent countries of the Euro Area, the evidence is waning. Another worrying development in the Euro Area is the emergence of unprecedented current account deficits in the southern Euro Area countries, while the northern ones enjoy substantial surpluses. To counter these new imbalances, new well-framed policy priorities are required in the Euro Area that put more emphasis on convergence and competitiveness than before.

Une importante littérature empirique a analysé, depuis le milieu des années 80, la relation entre les déficits budgétaires et commerciaux des Etats-Unis, sans jamais atteindre un consensus. Deux éléments peu-vent être pris en compte pour expliquer ces résultats contradictoires. La comparaison des données à niveau par rapport aux données stationnarisées a un impact sur les conclusions. On remarque, à côté de cela, que le lien entre les exportations nettes et le solde budgétaire des Etats-Unis, stationnarisés ou non, est instable. Ce manque de robustesse peut venir de changements dans la contribution relative des chocs de demande et d’oñre dans l’économie américaine : les chocs de demande génèrent généralement une corrélation positive entre les déficits commerciaux et fiscaux, tandis que les chocs d’offre impliquent une corrélation négative entre les deux séries. Afín de contrôler la relevance empirique de cette intuition, nous avons employé un modèle RBC standard. Avec différents taux estimés de volatilité des chocs d’offre et de demande, le modèle répond aux changements de corrélation entre la balance commerciale et fiscale des Etats-Unis pour chaque sous-exemple, exceptés les années 90.

Dans un monde à deux pays où la mobilité du capital est parfaite, on analyse l'interdépendance des pays lorsque les agents n'ont pas la même élasticité de substitution intertemporelle dans les deux pays. Cette hypothèse implique que plus l'élasticité de substitution intertemporelle est importante, plus le taux de croissance de la consommation est grand. Deux résultats apparaissent: le premier est que la dynamique de l'économie mondiale n'est pas indépendante de la répartition des richesses. Le second concerne les échanges commerciaux et financiers entre les pays. L'écart entre les taux de croissance de la consommation de chaque pays dû à des préférences différentes des agents est un déterminant essentiel des dynamiques de la balance courante et de la balance commerciale des pays.

Nous examinons l'effet de la situation économique de l'Allemagne après la réunification sur les taux d'intérêt en Europe et sur les taux de change vis-à-vis du dollar. Nous nous demandons en particulier ce qu'est la perspective la plus probable pour les parités, l'écart de taux d'intérêt entre la franc et le mark et les dettes exterieures. Nous ana-lysons la possibilité pour la France de mener une politique monétaire indépendante sans quitter le S.M.E. Cette possibilité dépend largement, nous le verrons, de la nature du risque de change entre franc, mark et dollar.