Article
Post-Communist Transition and Monetary Disintegration
Political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) at the end of 1980s and early 1990s resulted in just two episodes of monetary disintegration. Firstly, the end of Soviet geopolitical control over CEE led to the demise of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon) and its quasi-currency – the transferable ruble (TR). Shortly afterwards, the political disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Yugoslavia, and Czecho-Slovakia also caused monetary disintegrations. The newly independent successor states adopted their own currencies, however only the separation of the Czecho-Slovak crown (koruna) into two new currencies was conducted in and orderly manner, and without major macroeconomic turbulences and trade disruption.
Despite the impressive economic growth in Russia between 1999 and 2007, there is a fear that Russia may suffer the Dutch disease, which predicts that a country with large natural resource rents may experience a de-industrialisation and a lower long term economic growth. In this paper we study if there are any symptoms of the Dutch disease in Russia. Using a variety of Rosstat publications and the CHELEM database, we analyse the trends in production, wages and employment in the Russian manufacturing industries, and we study the behaviour of Russian imports and exports. We find that, while Russia exhibits some symptoms of the Dutch disease, e.g. the real appreciation of the rouble, the rise in real wages, the decrease in employment in manufacturing industries and the development of the services sector, the manufacturing production nonetheless increased, contradicting the theory of the Dutch disease. These trends can be explained by the gains in productivity and the recovery after the disorganisation in the 1990s, by new market opportunities for Russian products in the European Union and in CIS countries, by a growing Chinese demand for some products and by a booming internal market. Finally, investments in many manufacturing industries were largely encouraged, whereas those in the energy sector were strongly regulated, which contributed to the economic diversification.
I argue that the rather unfavorable conclusions of the three papers in the session on "Coordination and Tradeoffs" might not be as bad as they seem. In particular, I dwell on challenges facing the central bank using an interest rate that is different from the risk-free rate in its Taylor rule, and show that proper redefinition of the intercept and the slope of the rule allows avoidance of inflationary bias and preserves the stability of equilibrium.
The historical changes in Central and Eastern Europe demanded suitable paths for the transition from centrally planned to market based economies. The lack of relevant experience added to the challenge, giving rise to the incalculable risks of implementing untested policies. By focusing on monetary policy, trade, and convergence, this volume addresses some of the most urgent economic policy issues in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.
The author traces the analysis evolution of the monetary shocks effects on the economy, exploring the key approaches to modeling of the monetary transmission mechanism. The article emphasizes the necessity of the monetary transmission mechanism modification in the conditions of current financial crisis: the active role reflection of the financial intermediaries, accounting of the development degrees of institutional capacity in the economy.
This paper analyzes a stylized model of an export-oriented economy. It investigates the impact of macroeconomic policies on the dynamics of the exchange rate, inflation, output and stabilization fund and consider different forms of strategic interaction between the government and the central bank. It is shown that the effective interaction of fiscal and monetary policies is possible under Stackelberg interaction with the government as leader and under cooperation.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.