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The economic consequences of agricultural support: a survey
L. Alan Winters
What are the effects of OECD countries’ agricultural policies on their economic well-being? The article first establishes a conceptual framework for assessing the impact of protectionist policies on aggregate economic welfare, and then reviews sixteen recent studies - ranging in complexity from single-sector studies to general equilibrium models - which have quantified the social costs arising from agricultural policies in Japan, the United States and the EEC. After considering related aspects of agricultural policy, including national security and income distribution and stabilization, the article concludes that the economic returns from reform of agricultural policies are substantial.
Managing crises in the emerging financial landscape
Jeffrey R. Shafer
Rapid innovation and regulatory change in the financial sector have eroded barriers between once-distinct markets within countries and internationally, enhanced the flexibility and range of instruments traded in secondary markets and created an intensely competitive market environment in many areas where competition had once been restrained. This article explores how these broad changes may be altering the probability of crises in financial markets and the forms they might take. It concludes by drawing implications for the role of the lender of last resort and other systemic safeguards in averting or containing crises in the future.
A risk premium model of the yen-dollar and DM-dollar exchange rates
Mitsuhiro Fukao
Although the exchange rate is one of the most important economic variables, it has proved to be difficult to explain its movements. One of the difficulties is attributable to changes over time in the relative importance of various determinants of exchange rates, such as interest rates and balance of payments. This article tries to explain exchange rate movements by a model with a risk premium term and parameters which are affected by structural shifts in international financial markets. The results show that risk premium factors are highly significant, while real interest rate differentials have been increasing in importance in recent years.
OECD leading indicators
Ronny Nilsson
This article explains how the OECD system of leading indicators is constructed, covering the choice of reference cycles, selection of indicator series, identification of turning points, trend estimation and aggregation of series to produce composite indicators. The ability of the composite leading indicators to predict turning points in the industrial production cycle is evaluated using both the complete data that became available after the event as well as the more limited data set that was actually available at the time the indicators were first published. A final section looks at the ability of composite indicators to predict levels.
Indicators of international competitiveness: conceptual aspects and evaluation
Martine Durand and Claude Giorno
This paper reviews the methodological problems involved in constructing indicators of international competitiveness and provides some elements for their evaluation. It presents the measures of competitiveness calculated by the OECD and compares them with those published by other institutions. This comparison highlights the importance of the conceptual principles underlying the construction of such indicators and points to their respective areas of application. A number of indicators portraying special aspects of competitiveness phenomena are then described, together with examples of how they might be used, to illustrate the value of such measures, notably for purposes of cross-country analysis.
A note on the new OECD benchmark Purchasing Power Parities for 1985
Derek Blades and David Roberts
The OECD has recently published a new set of benchmark Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) for twenty-two Member countries based on price and expenditure data for 1985. The countries include Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Turkey, for which PPPs have neverpreviously been calculated. The main purpose of this note is to present these new PPPs and to explain how they differ from the previous benchmark estimates for 1980. The note also contains a brief discussion of the uses of PPPs and a short description of how they have been calculated. A final section gives some estimates for 1986 and 1987.
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