subjective interest rate uncertainty and the macroeconomy a cross country analysis abstract we ask whether uncertainty about interest rates is important for economic activity the effects of interest rate uncertainty on the economy are examined through the lens of a small var where the assumption that uncertainty can affect real activity contemporaneously but not vice versa is indeed in line with the data our measure of uncertainty stems from professional forecasts of short and long term interest rates and accounts for both disagreement among forecasters and the perceived variability of future aggregate shocks studying a panel of countries we find that subjective interest rate uncertainty has large negative and persistent effects on the economy

macroeconomic uncertainty through the lens of professional forecasters abstractwe analyze the evolution of macroeconomic uncertainty in the united states based on the forecast errors of consensus survey forecasts of various economic indicators comprehensive information contained in the survey forecasts enables us to capture a real time measure of uncertainty surrounding subjective forecasts in a simple framework we jointly model and estimate macroeconomic common and indicator specific uncertainties of four indicators using a factor stochastic volatility model our macroeconomic uncertainty estimates have three major spikes has three major spikes aligned with the 1973 1975 1980 and 2007 2009 recessions while other recessions were characterized by increases in indicator specific uncertainties we also show that the selection of data vintages affects the estimates and relative size of jumps in estimated uncertainty series finally our macroeconomic uncertainty has a persistent negative impact on real economic activity rather than producing wait and see dynamics

producer subsidy equivalents for russian agriculture estimation and interpretation in this paper we present estimates of producer subsidy equivalents pses for russian agriculture over the 1992 94 period the estimated values are highly negative indicating that russian agriculture has been heavily taxed two types of taxation have been at work first government trade and price policies at the regional as well as the federal level have operated to keep domestic producer prices below world prices second deficient russian physical and institutional infrastructure has resulted in high domestic transaction costs for russian agricultural output since in competing with goods on the world market russian producers must bear all the costs of getting their output to final users the high transaction costs in an economic sense also tax domestic production the pse methodology was created to measure the effect on agricultural prices and incomes of government policies targeted specifically at agriculture to be consistent with standard methodology one should subtract out from the initial price gap estimates for russian agricultural output that part of the price differential caused by deficient domestic infrastructure an alternative approach though is based on recognition that the deficient infrastructure was in

creative cities creative spaces and urban policy the paper presents the results of an international study of creative industry policies and strategies based on a survey of public sector creative city initiatives and plans and their underlying rationales as well as this survey and an accompanying literature review interviews were carried out with senior policy makers and intermediaries from europe north america africa and south east asia the paper considers the scope and scale of so called new industrial clusters in local cultural and creative quarters and sub regional creative hubs which are the subject of policy interventions and public private investment the semantic and symbolic expansion of the cultural industries and their concentration in once declining urban and former industrial districts to the creative industries and now to the knowledge and experience economy is revealed in economic sectoral and spatial terms whilst policy convergence and emulation are evident manifested by the promotion of creative spaces and industry clusters

uncertainty matters evidence from close elections abstract this paper uses a data rich environment to produce direct econometric estimates of macroeconomic and financial uncertainty for 11 advanced nations these indices exhibit significant independent variation from popular proxies and provide a refinement of the influential work of jurado et al 2015 that results in improved real time performance we use this new data in combination with narrative evidence to jointly identify macro uncertainty and financial shocks macro uncertainty shocks are identified with close elections and financial shocks with financial stress during financial crises we find that macro uncertainty shocks matter for the majority of countries and that the real effects of macro uncertainty shocks are generally larger conditioning on close elections these results are robust to controlling for news shocks and global uncertainty as well as a variety of shocks considered to be important drivers of the business cycle

calculating levels of protection is it always appropriate to use world reference prices based on current trading status abstract protection measures such as the nominal protection coefficient npc the effective protection coefficient epc the producer subsidy equivalent pse and the consumer subsidy equivalent cse are conventionally calculated using world reference prices based on current trading status under certain conditions the conventional approach can lead to incorrect estimation of the degree and sometimes even the direction of protection this paper spells out the conditions under which use of world reference prices based on current trading status is incorrect and presents data for wheat in pakistan to illustrate how failure to consider these conditions can lead to misleading policy recommendations

the evolving impact of global region specific and country specific uncertainty we develop a dynamic factor model with time varying parameters and stochastic volatility estimate it using a large panel of macroeconomic and financial data for 22 countries and decompose the vari

creative economy policy in developing countries the case of indonesia this paper investigates how the creative economy discourse is interpreted and implemented in the context of indonesia as a developing country our main conclusion is that the discourse is interpreted differently across localities bandung appears to be the only locality whose interpretation aligns with the general understanding of a creative economy that emphasises knowledge creation and innovation this was made possible by the strong support from academia and communities who wanted to experiment with this policy idea our study also provides an insight into a creative economy developing not only as a discourse but also as a workable framework for development policies in this city conversely other cities seem to pragmatically use the policy idea without considering the local context in a rebranding exercise in order to drive economic development whereby traditional cultural industries are relabelled as creative despite performing hardly any innovation activities despite this bandung illustrates th

measuring global and country specific uncertainty abstract motivated by the literature on the capital asset pricing model we decompose the uncertainty of a typical forecaster into common and idiosyncratic uncertainty using individual survey data from the consensus forecasts over the period of 1989 2014 we develop monthly measures of macroeconomic uncertainty covering 45 countries and construct a measure of global uncertainty as the weighted average of country specific uncertainties our measure captures perceived uncertainty of market participants and derives from two components that are shown to exhibit strikingly different behavior common uncertainty shocks produce the large and persistent negative response in real economic activity whereas the contributions of idiosyncratic uncertainty shocks are negligible

measuring forecast uncertainty by disagreement the missing link using a standard decomposition of forecast errors into common and idiosyncratic shocks we show that aggregate forecast uncertainty can be expressed as the disagreement among the forecasters plus the perceived variability of future aggregate shocks thus the reliability of disagreement as a proxy for uncertainty will be determined by the stability of the forecasting environment and the length of the forecast horizon using density forecasts from the survey of professional forecasters we find direct evidence in support of our hypothesis our results support the use of garch type models rather than the ex post squared errors in consensus forecasts to estimate the ex ante variability of aggregate shocks as a component of aggregate uncertainty copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

the impacts of structural oil shocks on macroeconomic uncertainty evidence from a large panel of 45 countries abstract using local projection methods this paper employs monthly panel data from 1989 to 2017 to examine both linear and nonlinear impulse responses of macroeconomic uncertainty to structural shocks to global oil production aggregate demand oil market specific demand and speculative demand in a large group of 45 economies we find that both oil supply and demand shocks are important drivers of uncertainty there is strong evidence that the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic uncertainty are regime dependent and contingent on the states of investor sentiments and perceived volatility in financial markets the responses of economic uncertainty to oil shocks especially demand side shocks appear to experience a dramatic change in the post global financial crisis period

the international effects of global financial uncertainty shocks abstract in this paper we study the impact of sudden rises in global financial uncertainty on small open economies to this end we extract a global factor from the realised volatilities of about 1000 risky asset returns from around the world we then analyse how shocks to this factor affect economic activity in 44 advanced and emerging small open economies by estimating local projections in a panel regression framework we find that shocks increasing global financial uncertainty have adverse consequences on output trade and unemployment while their impact on nominal variables is more heterogeneous across countries furthermore the effects are more severe in countries with a higher degree of trade or financial openness higher levels of vulnerabilities weaker institutions or during economic downturns

the artistic dividend urban artistic specialisation and economic development implications over the past two decades urban and regional policy makers have increasingly looked to the arts and culture as an economic panacea especially for the older urban core the arts regional economic contribution is generally measured by totalling the revenue of larger arts organisations associated expenditures by patrons and multiplier effects this approach underestimates the contributions of creative artists to a regional economy because of high rates of self employment and direct export activity because artists work enhances the design production and marketing of products and services in other sectors and because artists induce innovation on the part of suppliers artists create import substituting entertainment options for regional consumers and spend large shares of their own incomes on local arts output the paper takes a labour centred view of the arts economy hypothesising that many artists choose a locale in which to work often without regard to particular employers but in response to a nur

when ideas trump interests preferences world views and policy innovations the contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests elites lobbies and rent seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public the role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed yet each of the three components of the standard optimization problem in political economy preferences constraints and choice variables rely on an implicit set of ideas once the manner in which ideas enter these frameworks is made explicit a much richer and more convincing set of results can be obtained in particular new ideas about policy or policy entrepreneurship can exert an independent effect on equilibrium outcomes even in the absence of changes in the configuration of political power

producer subsidy equivalents and evaluation of support to russian agricultural producers since many of the conditions taken for granted in mature market economies cannot be assumed for transition economies such as russia the validity of producer subsidy equivalents pse measures is questionable the authors calculate pses for russia being careful in the selection of appropriate farm prices and reference prices and conduct a sensitivity analysis to indicate how the results could be influenced by changes in key assumptions they also provide appropriate interpretations of pse estimations for major agricultural commodities

exchange rate alignment and producer support estimates pses for india this article examines the effects of exchange rate alignment during 1985 2002 on agricultural producer support estimates pses for india based on several time series techniques the equilibrium exchange rate of the indian rupee and the corresponding misalignment of the actual rate are estimated and applied to recent pse calculations our results show that the exchange rate was substantially misaligned before a financial crisis and macroeconomic reform in the early 1990s with subsequent indirect effects on the pses we find a relatively high pass through of exchange rate movements to domestic agricultural prices so that removal of the exchange rate misalignment would have improved incentives to indian farmers during this period more recently this indirect exchange rate effect is smaller than the direct effect in the pses indicating the dominance of sectoral specific policies over economy wide policies

macroeconomic uncertainty indices based on nowcast and forecast error distributions abstract we propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty the indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional fo

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

forecast uncertainty ex ante and ex post u s inflation and output growth survey respondents who make point predictions and histogram forecasts of macro variables reveal both how uncertain they believe the future to be ex ante as well as their ex post performance macroeconomic forecasters tend to be overconfident at horizons of a year or more but overestimate i e are underconfident regarding the uncertainty surrounding their predictions at short horizons ex ante uncertainty remains at a high level compared to the ex post measure as the forecast horizon shortens there is little evidence of a link between individuals ex post forecast accuracy and their ex ante subjective assessments

how does financial development alter the impact of uncertainty abstract how does the impact of uncertainty on output vary with financial development levels we investigate this question empirically using a quarterly panel data set of 50 countries between 1971 and 2009 and an instrumental variables model the results support the conjecture that financial development mitigates the negative impact of uncertainty on output at the lower end of the distribution of the financial development levels one standard deviation increase in uncertainty decreases output by more than two standard deviations at the higher end of financial development the impact on output is statistically insignificant these results suggest that strengthening the financial system and increasing liquidity and credit availability improce the robustness of growth performance during periods of uncertainty

credit intermediation and the transmission of macro financial uncertainty international evidence abstract this paper introduces a novel measure of global macro financial uncertainty and examines the state dependent transmission of uncertainty to economic activity we show that global uncertainty shocks have adverse and nonlinear macroeconomic effects with the nonlinearity being driven by different levels of country specific banking sector distress both macroeconomic and financial market uncertainty are associated with lower economic activity with the latter exerting stronger effects the state dependency of the effect is prevalent in both cases our findings have important policy implications highlighting both the state of the banking sector as well as the origin of uncertainty as crucial factors in the transmission of uncertainty

decomposing changes in agricultural price gaps an application to russia the article develops a method for decomposing changes in agricultural price gaps defined as the difference between a commodity s domestic producer and border prices we use oecd s procedure for decomposing changes in the market price support part of producer support estimates as the starting point for our decomposition method and our method provides a basis for critiquing oecd s decomposition approach the transmission of changes in border prices world prices and the exchange rate to domestic prices is a key element in the decomposition the method is demonstrated using russian agricultural price gaps the results support the argument that for russian agriculture during the transition period the main cause of changes in price gaps has been incomplete transmission of changes in the exchange rate to domestic prices and where the weak transmission results mainly not from policy intervention but rather from deficient market conditions in particular poor market infrastructure the policy implication is that underdeveloped infrastructure has strongly limited the benefits to the russian economy from agricultural trade liberalization

the implications of central bank transparency for uncertainty and disagreement abstract using survey data from 25 economies we provide evidence that greater transparency surrounding monetary policy reduces uncertainty of interest rates and inflation primarily by reducing uncertainty that is common to agents rather than disagreement between agents this suggests that studies that focus on disagreement as a proxy for uncertainty understate the benefits of monetary policy transparency the adoption of inflation targets and forward guidance are both associated with lower uncertainty although inflation targets have a stronger impact on reducing uncertainty than forward guidance moreover there are diminishing benefits from ever higher levels of transparency taken as a whole our results support the contention that clarity of communication is as important as the magnitude of transparency