In April 2015, Canada will hand the chairmanship of the Arctic Council to the United States. As the chair, the United States will have an opportunity to shape the priorities of the Arctic Council for the next two years and communicate its vision for the future of the circumpolar region. In anticipation of acquiring this leadership role, the United States first provided a sense of its vision for the chairmanship on September 30, 2014 in Washington, DC, during the Passing the Arctic Council Torch conference supported by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Trade analysis in the current moment is understandably focused on mega-regional negotiations, but plurilateral talks also deserve our attention. This paper takes plurilateral negotiations leading to a Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) as its focus. It argues that the barriers to trade in services are distinct and their removal consequential; thus inviting careful consideration and, ideally, public debate. Five key questions about TiSA are examined. The answers to these questions are not clear, making this a propitious moment to explore promising avenues for both maximizing the gains and minimizing the costs of services liberalization.
The creation of the multilateral development bank (MDB) model represents one of the most ingenious financial innovations in recent times. Initially designed to address the problems of financing reconstruction after World War II, this model has shown itself to be surprisingly adaptable to meet a range of other challenges. These have included fostering developing country growth, dealing with the developing world debt problem and facilitating the transition of countries within Central and Eastern Europe from centrally planned to market-based economies.
Regulators have largely agreed on the main elements of a strengthened and internationally harmonized financial regulatory regime, endorsed at the 2014 Brisbane G20 Leaders Summit. These measures are a major step toward achieving a robust and less crisis-prone global financial system. Nevertheless, a number of specific measures need to receive closer attention in order for Group of Twenty (G20) leaders to declare their reform program a success.
Gross capital inflows and outflows to and from emerging market economies have witnessed a significant increase since the early 2000s. This rapid increase in the volume of flows, accompanied by sharp swings in volatility, has amplified the complexity of macroeconomic management in emerging economies. This paper focuses on capital flows in selected emerging Asian economies, analyzing surge and stop episodes as well as changes in the composition of flows across these episodes, then evaluating the policy measures undertaken by these economies in response to the surge and stop of capital flows. This kind of analysis is highly relevant, especially at a time when emerging economies around the world are facing the repercussions of a potential monetary policy normalization in the United States and continuing quantitative easing measures by the European Central Bank, either of which could once again heighten the volatility of cross-border capital flows, thereby posing renewed macroeconomic challenges for major EMEs.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, International Trade and Finance, and Monetary Policy
This paper addresses the proposed transfer of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversight away from the US government. The background section explores how the technical architecture of critical Internet resources has certain governance implications, introduces the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and its relationship with the US government through the IANA function and the Affirmation of Commitments. After discussing why the relationship has caused controversy, the paper describes the work underway within ICANN to find a successor oversight mechanism and provides a short critique of the proposals so far. The majority of the paper is taken up with more general issues relating to ICANN's accountability. It explains how the IANA transition was recognized to be dependent on ICANN's wider accountability, and the trust issues between community and leadership that this exposed. There follows an analysis of ICANN's strengths and weaknesses in relation to accountability and transparency, followed by conclusions and recommendations.
The years prior to the global financial crisis were a peculiar period for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF was struggling to define its role and justify its existence even as trouble was brewing in countries it would later help to rescue. To understand the Fund's current strengths and weaknesses, a look back at this era is highly illuminating.
This paper shows that debt flows have contractionary effects on emerging markets' output, while equity flows have expansionary effects. Such correlations can be driven by counter-cyclical debt flows and pro-cyclical equity flows, or by debt flows that lead to an appreciation and hurt exports, and by equity flows that improve the productivity of the real economy, broadly defined. It focuses on business cycle frequencies and the effect of global risk appetite in driving capital flows into emerging markets. A positive initial impact of debt flows on output is followed by a negative impact. Equity flows have a positive impact on output initially, and thereafter. Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows have a positive effect on output only after a two-year lag, and if this period coincides with increased global uncertainty, the effect on output reverses, but the total effect stays positive. This result also holds for equity flows, suggesting that during increased periods of uncertainty, private investors leave emerging markets. Quantitative impacts are not large except in the case of FDI flows.
This paper observes that short-selling bans spread globally beginning in 2007. We seek to empirically determine whether there were spillover effects over and above the domestic impact from the imposition of such bans. There is some evidence that the bans were unsuccessful, at least insofar as they did not take into account the global component a short-selling ban might have. In the individual countries we examine, the bans had relatively little impact. Nevertheless, our finding that equity returns do not appear to show a decline may be evidence that the bans stemmed further deterioration in stock prices that policy makers sought to avoid.
Expanding the access of financial services to low-income households and other disadvantaged groups has become an important public policy goal in the past decade. Many developing economies have encouraged the introduction of a variety of programs, services and branchless banking instruments ranging from automatic teller machines to cell phones to reach people for whom traditional, branch-based structures, had not. After the 2008 global financial crisis, the leaders of the Group of Twenty (G20) recognized the need to further promote these initiatives as key components in the development of healthy, vibrant and stable financial systems that contribute to sustainable economic growth and lower levels of income inequality. As a result, financial inclusion has become one of the new areas of international financial regulation coordination, alongside shadow banking, resolution regimes and new capital requirements.