Please select from the titles below:
- The Employment and Earnings of Britain’s Senior Citizens
- Flexible Rules cum Constrained Discretion: A New Consensus in Monetary Policy
- Testing for Long-Run Comovement, Common Features and Efficiency in Emerging Stock Markets: Evidence from the Caribbean
- The Role of International Diversification in Public Pension Systems: The Case of Pakistan
- Testing for Non-linearity in the Balancing Item of Balance of Payments Accounts: The Case of 20 Industrial Countries
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The Employment and Earnings of Britain’s Senior Citizens (p.1)
by D Leslie, D Blackaby, P Murphy and N O’Leary Britain's senior citizens, in common with the rest of Europe, are the fastest growing age group among the population and the numbers working have grown substantially. In 2007 the numbers working at or beyond the state pension age (65 and over for men, 60 and over for women) was 1.26 million, a number that has doubled over the past decade. In Europe generally these numbers will rise substantially. Using (mainly) a pooled dataset from the Labour Force Survey, the paper explores the determinants of the decision to work by household type (those with a partner and those without) as well as earnings, which are generally low. Female disadvantage appears to be a feature, just as with the working age population. Some comments about data discrimination against senior citizens are also made.
Flexible Rules cum Constrained Discretion: A New Consensus in Monetary Policy (p.27)
by P Arestis and A Mihailov
This paper demonstrates that recent influential contributions to monetary policy imply an emerging consensus whereby neither rigid rules nor complete discretion are found optimal. Instead, middle-ground monetary regimes based on rules (operative under 'normal' circumstances) to anchor inflation expectations over the long run, but designed with enough flexibility to mitigate the short-run effect of shocks (with communicated discretion in 'exceptional' circumstances temporarily overriding these rules), are gaining support in theoretical models and policy formulation and implementation. The opposition of 'rules versus discretion' has, thus, reappeared as the synthesis of 'rules cum discretion', in essence as inflation-forecast targeting. But such synthesis is not without major theoretical problems, as we argue in this contribution. Furthermore, the very recent real-world events have made it obvious that the inflation targeting strategy of monetary policy, which rests upon the new consensus paradigm in modern macroeconomics is at best a 'fair weather' model. In the turbulent economic climate of highly unstable inflation, deep financial crisis and world-wide, abrupt economic slowdown nowadays this approach needs serious rethinking to say the least, if not abandoning it altogether.
Testing for Long-Run Comovement, Common Features and Efficiency in Emerging Stock Markets: Evidence from the Caribbean (p.55)
by T Lorde, B Francis and A GreeneThis study investigates comovement, common features and efficiency in CARICOM stock markets. The stock markets of Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago are examined for the period 1991:1-2006:12, using the techniques of cointegration and common feature testing. No evidence is found of long-run or short-run comovement, or common features. These findings imply that (1) the BSE, JSE and TTSE are weakly efficient; (2) markets are segmented; and (3) there may be benefits from regional diversification of asset portfolios.
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The Role of International Diversification in Public Pension Systems: The Case of Pakistan
(p.81)
by W Pfau Pakistan's pension system is in the process of increasing funding in anticipation of providing for a growing elderly population. The pension assets are mainly invested domestically, as only in January 2007 were regulations changed to allow the purchase of international assets. In this paper, we quantify how diversification of the pension funds to include world financial assets could help in improving the sustainability of Pakistan pensions, by simultaneously increasing expected returns and decreasing volatility. These arguments are made using historical data, and the robustness of our findings is demonstrated using a large variety of alternative assumptions about future asset returns, risks, and correlations. We find that international diversification could dramatically help to create sustainability for Pakistan's main public pension system available to private workers.
Testing for Non-linearity in the Balancing Item of Balance of Payments Accounts: The Case of 20 Industrial Countries
(p.107)
by T TangThe non-linearity of financial and economic time series is becoming a fundamental issue both at the theoretical and empirical level. This applies equally to balance of payments statistics such as balancing item (net errors and omissions), which is a residual variable needed to ensure that all debit and credit entries in the balance of payments statement sum to zero. This univariate variable is only one of a number of accounting balances that can be established in economic statistics that are used in assessing the accuracy of the balance of payments statistics. Except for Tang et al (forthcoming), the existing works which have studied the balancing item either disregard the presence of non-linearity or assume at the outset that the non-linearity takes a particular form. An AR(p) model is employed in the present paper to remove any linear structure from the balancing item series. Applying a battery of non-linearity tests, the assumption of linearity is tested for 20 industrial countries' balancing item. In general, the statistical tests reveal the presence of non-linear dependencies in the balancing item series for 16 out of the 20 industrial countries. An implication is that the non-linear dynamics of these balancing item series should be incorporated in the modelling and forecasting exercises for a majority of the countries.
Page last modified on 20 September 2009