BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS. This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org).

The macroeconomic spillover effects of the pandemic on the global economy Key takeaways •Given the historical persistence of economic activity, the reduction of GDP due to confinement measures is likely to drag on over several quarters. The total GDP shortfall could be as much as twice that implied by the direct initial effects of confinement.• This persistence reflects in part two types of spillovers across countries. One is due to the risk that uncoordinated confinements lead to repeated virus outbreaks and confinements across the globe. Another is the more traditional trade and financial integration interlinkages.• Economic spillovers and spillbacks across the major economic blocs are large. There is no immunity from the economic effects if the epidemic is controlled in only one or two regions. Countries should adopt confinement, border control and macroeconomic policies that internalise these global considerations.

In spite of early skepticism on the merits of floating exchange rate regimes in emerging markets, 8 of the 25 largest countries in this group have now had a floating exchange rate regime for more than a decade. Using parsimonious VAR specifications covering the period of floating exchange rates, this study finds that exchange rate pass-throughs to consumer price indices in these emerging floaters have typically been moderate even though emerging floaters have seen considerable nominal and real exchange rate volatilities. Previous studies that set out to estimate exchange rate pass-throughs ignored changes in policy regimes, making them vulnerable to the Lucas critique. We find that, within the group of emerging floaters, estimated pass-throughs are higher for countries with greater nominal exchange rate volatilities and that trade more homogeneous goods. These findings are consistent with the pass-through model of Floden and Wilander (2006) and earlier findings by Campa and Goldberg (2005), respectively. Furthermore, we find that the Indonesian Rupiah, the Thai Baht and possibly the Mexican Peso are commodity currencies, in the sense that their real exchange rates are cointegrated with international commodity prices.

This paper models the executive's choice of whether to reschedule external debt as the outcome of an intra-governmental negotiation process. The executive's necessity of a confidence vote from the legislature is found to provide the rationale for why some democracies may not renegotiate their foreign obligations. Empirically, parliamentary democracies are indeed less prone to reschedule their foreign liabilities or accumulate arrears on them. Most of the democracies that have been able to significantly reduce their debt/GNP ratio without a 'credit incident' were parliamentary. Moreover, countries with stronger political checks on the executive and lower executive turnover have a lower rescheduling propensity. These results suggest that North and Weingast's account of the evolution of institutions in 17th century England gives substantial mileage in understanding the international debt markets in the contemporary developing world.

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Presidential democracies were 4.9 times more likely than parliamentary democracies to default on external debts between 1976 and 2000. In this article I argue that the explanation for the serial defaults by a number of sovereign borrowers lies in their constitutions. Ceteris paribus, parliamentary democracies are less likely than presidential democracies to default on their liabilities because the confidence requirement creates a credible link between economic policies and the executive's political survival. This link tends to strengthen the repayment commitment when politicians are opportunistic. I show that this effect is large in the contemporary world even when the comparison is restricted to countries that are similar in terms of colonial origin, geography, and economic variables. Since a country's form of government is typically chosen at the time of independence and is highly persistent over time, constitutions can explain why debt policies in developing countries are related to individual histories.

This paper analyzes the incidence of domestic and external debt crises for a sample of 53 emerging economies between 1980 and 2005. Even though there is substantial time variation in the default rates during the period, sovereign default rates for domestic debts are typically lower than those for external debts. The incidence of both types of defaults is explained by means of the estimation of independent and simultaneous limited-dependent variable models. The results show that while there is considerable evidence that external defaults trigger domestic defaults, evidence for the reverse link disappears when default propensities are estimated in a simultaneous equation model. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.