The US-China trade dispute: A macro perspective
Vol:
11/2019
Author name:
Tyers R
Zhou Y
Year:
2019
Month:
February
Abstract:
The recent rise of populism and authoritarian politics has seen a turn from multilateralism and toward international disputes like that between the US and China. This paper uses a calibrated global macro model to assess the potential economic consequences of this conflict under explicit assumptions about monetary and fiscal policy. US unilateral protection emerges as “beggar thy neighbor” policy, the more so if new tariff revenue affords capital tax relief. China’s proportional losses are comparatively large and little mitigated by retaliation, which nonetheless constrains US net gains. Avoiding leakage by protecting against all sources causes substantial losses in third regions trading with China and the US.

Publication file:
PDF document 11_2019_tyers_zhou.pdf

Identifying global and national output and fiscal policy shocks using a GVAR
Vol:
06/2019
Author name:
Chudik A
Pesaran MH
Mohaddes K
Year:
2019
Month:
January
Abstract:
The paper contributes to the growing global VAR (GVAR) literature by showing how global and national shocks can be identified within a GVAR framework. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of the interactions between public debt and real output growth in a multicountry setting, and the results are compared to those obtained from standard single country VAR analysis. We find that on average (across countries) global shocks explain about one third of the long-horizon forecast error variance of output growth, and about one fifth of the long run variance of the rate of change of debt-to-GDP. Evidence on the degree of cross-sectional dependence in these variables and their innovations are exploited to identify the global shocks, and priors are used to identify the national shocks within a Bayesian framework. It is found that posterior median debt elasticity with respect to output is much larger when the rise in output is due to a fiscal policy shock, as compared to when the rise in output is due to a positive technology shock. The cross country average of the median debt elasticity is 1.58 when the rise in output is due to a fiscal expansion as compared to 0.75 when the rise in output follows from a favorable output shock.

Publication file:
PDF document 6_2019_chudik_pesaran_mohaddes.pdf

Crawford School of Public Policy
CAMA
Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis