Consumption, Income, and International Capital Market Integration


Book Description

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.







Consumption, Income, and International Capital Market Integration


Book Description

This paper uses consumption patterns across countries to measure capital market integration. It argues that earlier empirical tests of this type were potentially mis-specified and proposes a more robust specification. The results indicate that Japan was the only industrialized country for which national consumption was fully integrated with the rest of the world over the period 1973-89. For the other countries the source of the failure varies. Within the EC it is generally associated with incomplete integration across capital markets. Elsewhere, consumption is found to be excessively dependent on disposable income.




Savings, Growth and Capital Markets Imperfections


Book Description

This paper studies the effects that borrowing constraints have on savings and growth and argues that, though they increase savings, their effect on growth is ambiguous. Empirical evidence on the extent of borrowing constraints as well as savings, investment, human capital accumulation and growth performance for industrialized countries is presented. A simple model to show the effects of borrowing constraints on savings is developed. Then the model is extended to analyze the effects of borrowing constraints on human capital accumulation and growth. It is shown that borrowing constraints increase savings, but reduce human capital accumulation.







Imperfect Capital Markets and Life-cycle Consumption; a Model and Empirical Test for Urban Colombia


Book Description

Paper comprising an economic model to test assumptions that consumption and savings decisions in urban area Colombia are based on lifetime projections of income and family size and changes in interest rates for credit and lending - suggests that optimal consumption is dependent on changes in household income distribution and capital market opportunities, etc. Graphs and statistical tables.




Discussion Papers


Book Description




Income Distribution, Market Imperfections and Capital Accumulation in a Developing Economy


Book Description

The book explains the problem of insufficient capital accumulation and growth in a less developed country. In conventional analyses, such explanations are often found exogenised in terms of factors such as socio-cultural attitudes towards saving and investment, irrationality of peasant behaviour, technological aspects of externalities and demographic parameters. This book provides an alternative explanation in terms of distribution of income and assets. Focusing on the agricultural sector of a developing economy, it describes how this approach can be extended to cover the industrial sector as well. Further, it develops a model that is then used to analyse the specific problem of capital accumulation in agriculture.