What are the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal policy uncertainty? Recently, many economists and policy makers are concerned about the adverse effects that uncertainty in fiscal policy has on economic activity. In the U.S., for example, the debt-ceiling crisis and the federal government shutdown have ele- vated government spending policy uncertainty and people are concerned about consequent adverse ...

With global recovery not in sight, along with calls for stronger structural reform, international policy coordination is again under spotlight. Correcting global imbalance would contribute towards closing the demand gap. Emerging economies in particular should allow greater exchange rate flexibility and not intervene in the foreign exchange market to reflect fundamentals. Yet, the impact of greater ...

Over the past decades, financial markets have been integrated across countries while income inequality has increased in most countries. This paper studies the effect of financial market integration on income inequality and investigates whether the effect varies with the degree of financial market development. We find an empirical evidence that financial market integration and financial market ...

In this paper, we examine the impact of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the overall employment in a sourcing country, using Korean industry-level data for the period 2007-2014. We further decompose the effects of OFDI into types of foreign investment and workers’ skill levels, separately for each employment status (permanent and temporary), so that we capture whether the MNEs initiating ...

This paper analyzes 2015-TPA voting patterns in the Congress in the context of the trade negotiating objectives. By setting the trade negotiating objectives, the Congress lays out important trade agenda that the Administration is expected to address when it is negotiating trade deals with foreign countries. Therefore setting the objectives is subject of heated debates in the Congress and an important ...

Productivity is considered one of the most important factors for economic growth. Total productivity grows through technological progress or reallocation of re­sources. This paper analyses their contribution to economic growth for total economy and by sectors. The main finding is that economy-wide increases but this is mainly due to internal technological improvements. On the one hand, inter-sector ...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most important economic program initiated by a developing country, with the intent of enhancing trade and economic development across continents. While expectations persist that the initiative can contribute to Africa’s trade and developmental process, there exist limited evidences to support and uphold the notion. This study attempts to evaluate the degree ...

This study tests whether Ricardian comparative advantage is valid for value added in exports that does not include intermediate inputs imported from vari- ous industries in a number of countries. Using a panel data on valued added contents of bilateral exports, we find that changes in the labor productivity lead to growth of value added in exports. This implies that Ricardian comparative advantage ...

We propose a new measure of inter-industry ‘distance’. This is constructed à la Antras et al. (2012). While they measure the distance of an industry from its final use – what they call ‘downstreamness’ of an industry – we measure the distance between a pair of industries. Our proposed index is a measure of in- put-output linkages between industries that incorporates a ‘distance’ flavor. Our measure ...

Official estimates peg global business-to-business ecommerce at 15 trillion dollars and global business-to-consumer ecommerce at 1.2 trillion dollars in 2013 (UNCTAD 2015). When we turn to official estimates for Korea, it is easy to find that Korea’s business-to-consumer ecommerce market is growing at more than twenty percent per year and has emerged as the third largest global ecommerce market in ...