Abdur R. Chowdhury

Private Savings in Transition Economies: Are There Terms of Trade Shocks?

Abdur R. Chowdhury — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:53:34 PDT

Economic agents in the transition economies are subject to tight credit constraints, which are more pronounced during bad state of nature. Thus, adverse shocks to commodity prices in the world market can force them to reduce savings by a larger amount than they would otherwise have. Empirical analysis using a dynamic panel model and data from 21 transition economies confirm that most of the determinants of savings identified in the literature also apply to the transition economies. The transitory component in the terms of trade have a larger positive impact than the permanent component. This reflects the lack of access to foreign borrowing. Although the impact of terms of trade shocks is found to be asymmetric, the magnitude of the impact appears to be small. The results are robust for alternative estimators, determinants and country groupings.

FDI and Growth: What Causes What?

Abdur R. Chowdhury et al. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:49:41 PDT

This paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality, to time-series data covering the period 1969–2000 for three developing countries, namely Chile, Malaysia and Thailand, all of them major recipients of FDI with a different history of macroeconomic episodes, policy regimes and growth patterns. Our empirical findings clearly suggest that it is GDP that causes FDI in the case of Chile and not vice versa, while for both Malaysia and Thailand, there is a strong evidence of a bi-directional causality between the two variables. The robustness of the above findings is confirmed by the use of a bootstrap test employed to test the validity of our results.

Substitution Between Money and Near Monies in Switzerland

Abdur R. Chowdhury et al. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:44:02 PDT

Does Real Exchange Rate Volatility Affect Foreign Direct Investment? Evidence from four Developed Countries

Abdur R. Chowdhury et al. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:37:23 PDT

This study examines the impact of shocks to exchange rate uncertainty (volatility) on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The analysis is conducted using vector autoregressive models that contain the price level, real output, the real exchange rate, the volatility of the real exchange rate, the interest rate, and FDI. The results from variance decompositions yield public policy implications. In Canada, Japan, and the United States, innovations to exchange rate uncertainty explain significant portions of the forecast error variance in FDI at longer time horizons. The impulse response functions indicate that, to the extent that shocks to exchange rate volatility have an impact on FDI, the impact is positive and takes place with a lag.