The significant role of government consumption in affecting economic conditions raises the necessity for monetary policy to take into account the behaviour of fiscal policy and to also take into account how the presence of the fiscal sector might affect the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the economy. To test for this, we build an otherwise standard New Keynesian model that incorporates non-separable government consumption. The simulations of the model show that when government consumption has a crowding-in effect on private consumption, it will dampen the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and vice versa. The empirical estimations of the paper also support the theoretical findings of the model, as the panel regressions show that, in OECD countries, government consumption dampens the effect of the policy rate on private consumption. These results are robust to the zero lower bound era.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper then, is to add to the existing literature on financial contagion. While a vast amount of the debate has been made using data from the late 1990s, this paper differentiates itself by analysing more current data, centred around the most recent global financial crisis, with specific focus on the stock markets of Hong Kong and Tokyo.Design/methodology/approachEmploying Pearson and Spearman correlation measures, the dynamic relationship of the two markets is determined over tranquil and crisis periods, as specified by an Markov-Switching Bayesian Vector AutoRegression (MSBVAR) model.FindingsThe authors find evidence in support of the existence of financial contagion (defined as an increase in correlation during a crisis period) for all frequencies of data analysed. This contagion is greatest when examining lower-frequency data. Additionally, there is also weaker evidence in some data sub-samples to support “herding” behaviour, whereby higher market correlations persist, following a crisis period.Research limitations/implicationsThe intention of this paper was not to analyse the cause or transmission mechanism of contagion between financial markets. Therefore future studies could extend the methodology used in this paper by including exogenous macroeconomic factors in the MSBVAR model.Originality/valueThe results of this paper serve to explain why the debate of the persistence and in fact existence of financial contagion remains alive. The authors have shown that the frequency of a time series dataset has a significant impact on the level of observed correlation and thus observation of financial contagion.

The existing literature has always assumed that commodity-rich countries are a homogeneous group, resulting in the generalisation of any findings obtained from a single commodityrich economy. This paper proposes a small open economy model for a commodity-rich country and studies the triggers of business cycles for four different commodity-rich economies to highlight the existence of heterogeneity among commodity-rich economies. The model introduces government consumption in a non-separable form to the utility function. Commodities have a central role in private consumption, production of final goods, and windfalls for the domestic government. We feed the model with a variety of shocks that were previously proposed by the previous literature. The estimations of the model show that oil-rich economies are more vulnerable to external shocks than their commodity-rich counterparts. This is mainly the result of the size of commodity windfalls in the economy, as the share of oil revenues are significantly higher than the revenues of other commodities, as a ratio of output. The results also show that there exists a policy crowding out effect of fiscal policy to monetary policy in oil-rich economies, all explaining the choice of an exchange rate peg regime in most oil-rich economies.

This paper examines the presence of asymmetry in the response of the Libyan economy to fluctuations in oil prices, subsequent to discovery of oil in the country. Three Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models are illustrated and estimated along with a multivariate rolling VAR approach. All sectors are found to react asymmetrically to shocks in oil prices over the 1962-2012 period. The magnitude of the adverse effect of the negative oil shocks on the manufacturing and agriculture sector appears to outweigh the positive effect of the positive oil shocks. The services sector, on the other hand, is able to overcome the shocks of the oil prices, due to absence of external competition. In addition, the results of the Multivariate rolling VAR highlight the existence of structural changes in the relationship between sectors of the Libyan economy and oil prices. The essay recommends implementing fiscal policy reform to de-link the real sector from fluctuations in oil prices. It also advises promoting the development of the financial sector in order for it to contribute in the diversification of the economy.

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