Economic Policies in Developing and Emerging Market Economies: Three Essays in International and Development Economics.

摘要

This thesis consists of three essays, which focus on different aspects of economic policy issues faced by developing and emerging market economies. The first essay explores the effect of monetary policy credibility on exchange rate volatility in a small open economy, even if the exchange rate is not an explicit target set by the monetary authority. Using an open economy framework modified from Gall and Monacelli (2005) and Walsh (2006), it shows that monetary policy credibility helps to stabilize the exchange rate as supply and demand side shocks hit the domestic economy. The monetary policy credibility can be achieved by the monetary authority's commitment to certain rules aiming for output/price smoothing. In the empirical analysis inflation targeting is used as a proxy variable for monetary credibility. The GARCH model of selected South-East Asian countries indicates that countries with inflation targeting policies have exhibited reduced exchange rate volatility when other factors are controlled.;The third essay deals with the resource/revenue reallocation within powerful groups in the economy and the impact of the rent-seeking behavior of these groups on the economic growth and the social welfare. In particular, it introduces a dynamic model of resource-grabbing by status-conscious agents, i.e., agents value not only their absolute consumption levels, but also the relative status within his/her reference group. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of the "positional externalities" on the urge to seek rent and to connect the "tragedy of the commons" problem with relative consumption. The model shows that the greater is agents' concern about their relative status, the more aggressively they tend to behave. Consequently, the social welfare is lower because the growth rate of the public asset is reduced due to higher extraction rate. After introducing heterogeneity, it shows that the social welfare decreases as the distribution of status-consciousness among agents widens. Finally, it provides some policy suggestions that the government might consider to achieve a second best social outcome.;The second essay looks at FDI inflows into developing economies. Two distinctive differences of FDI inflows between developed and developing economies are entry modes and evidence of government regulations. This essay investigates the incentives of FDI flows in terms of cost-saving merger, fixed cost of entry and the role of government policies. In particular it shows that, if the cost-saving effect is large and the government intervenes, the foreign firm will consider the FDI through either Greenfield or Brownfield, which corresponds to the situation for FDI flows into developing economies. Otherwise, the foreign firm will only consider Brownfield or staying outside, which stands for the developed economy case. Since one remarkable feature of the FDI flows into developing countries is the benefit of cost-saving from low labour costs, this essay takes this effect into account and provides insights for economic "outsourcing". The multi-stage sequential game model presented in this chapter provides comparable results for the pattern of the FDI flows affected by regulation and institutional factors, which are not addressed by existing literature. Finally, it reveals some intuition and feature of a developing economy where the government regulations on FDI flows are more often observed.