Mr.Giovanni Dell'Ariccia

Ms.Aleksandra Zdzienicka

Alexander F. Tieman

Ms.Deniz O Igan

Mr.Paolo Mauro

Hala Moussawi

We track direct public interventions and public holdings in 1,114 financial institutions over the period 2007–17 in 37 countries based on publicly available information. We use aggregate official data to validate this new dataset and estimate the fiscal impact of interventions, including the value of asset holdings remaining in state hands at end-2017. Direct public support to financial institutions amounted to $1.6 trillion ($3.5 trillion including guarantees), with larger amounts allocated to lower capitalized and less profitable banks. As of end-2017, only a few countries had fully divested the initial support they provided during the crisis. Public holdings were divested faster in better capitalized, more profitable, and more liquid banks, and in countries where the economy recovered faster. In countries where the government stake remained high relative to the initial intervention, private investment and credit growth were slower, financial access, depth, efficiency, and competition were worse, and financial stability improved less.

The Long Shadow of the Global Financial Crisis: Public Interventions in the Financial Sector

Mr.Haonan Qu

Davide Furceri

Mr.Shekhar Aiyar

Yi Ji

Mr.Romain A Duval

Daniel Garcia-Macia

Mr.John C Bluedorn

Davide Malacrino

Jesse Siminitz

Cross-country differences in economic resilience—in an economy’s ability to withstand and adjust to shocks—remain significant in the euro area. In part, the differences reflect the lack of a national nominal exchange rate as a mechanism to adjust to shocks. The IMF staff has argued that union-wide architectural changes such as the banking union, the capital markets union, and a central fiscal capacity can help foster greater international risk sharing. Yet even these changes cannot insure against all shocks. National policies thus have a vital role to play. This IMF staff discussion note analyzes how national structural policies can help euro area countries better deal with economic shocks. Using a mix of empirical and modeling approaches, the note finds that growth-enhancing reforms to labor and product market regulations, tailored to country-specific circumstances, would help individual euro area economies weather adverse shocks. Higher-quality insolvency regimes are associated with more efficient factor reallocation following a shock. The note also finds that structural and cyclical policies interact. Greater rigidities make economies more fragile, putting a higher burden on fiscal policy. This is especially true for members of a monetary union. Countries should build fiscal space in good times and tackle rigidities, reducing their need for countercyclical policies in bad times while making countercyclical policies more effective when deployed.

The Role of National Structural Reforms in Building Resilience

Strengthening the Euro Area

João Tovar Jalles

Until recently, China has been the leading contributor to global economic growth and—since the recent global financial crisis—a stabilizing driver of its evolution. However, as China recently began to rebalance its economy away from investment and exports and toward consumption, its GDP growth slowed significantly—partly reversing the country’s contribution to global output and trade growth—and is expected to continue to decline gradually over the medium term. There is little consensus regarding the consequences of a China’s growth slowdown for the rest of the world, with some arguing that a significant slowdown in China may have large implications and possibly lead to a worldwide recession if the “rebalancing” process is not well managed, and others suggesting that even a significant slowdown in China is unlikely to have large global effects, as its role in the world economy is still limited This note contributes to the ongoing debate by analyzing how growth shocks in China affect particular regions and country groups and how the impact and key transmission channels of these growth shocks have increased over time. It finds that historically, the average impact of growth shocks in China on global output has been statistically significant but limited, but since the early 2000s, the magnitude of spillovers has significantly increased. Trade linkages remain the main transmission channels, with larger effects for net commodity exporters and countries mostly exporting manufacturing goods. Also, spillover effects tend to be larger during periods of high global uncertainty and have been positively associated with an increase in the share of industry in total value in China, which suggests an important role of the “rebalancing” process.

New Evidence From Time-Varying Estimates

China Spillovers

Ms.Aleksandra Zdzienicka

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