Corruption is macro-relevant for many countries, but is often hidden, making measurement of it-and its effects-inherently difficult. Existing indicators suffer from several weaknesses, including a lack of time variation due to the sticky nature of perception-based measures, reliance on a limited pool of experts, and an inability to distinguish between corruption and institutional capacity gaps. This paper attempts to address these limitations by leveraging news media coverage of corruption. We contribute to the literature by constructing the first big data, crosscountry news flow indices of corruption (NIC) and anti-corruption (anti-NIC) by running country-specific search algorithms over more than 665 million international news articles. These indices correlate well with existing measures of corruption but offer additional richness in their time-series variation. Drawing on theory from the corporate finance and behavioral economics literature, we also test to what extent news about corruption and anti-corruption efforts affects economic agents' assessments of corruption and, in turn, economic outcomes. We find that NIC shocks appear to negatively impact both financial (e.g., stock market returns and yield spreads) and real variables (e.g., growth), albeit with some country heterogeneity. On average, NIC shocks lower real per capita GDP growth by 3 percentage points over a two-year period, illustrating persistence in the effect of such shocks. Conversely, there is suggestive evidence that anti-NIC efforts appear to have a sustained positive macro impact only when paired with meaningful institutional strengthening, proxied by capacity development efforts.
We use a dynamic small open economy model to explore the macroeconomic impact of alternative public investment scaling-up scenarios, analyzing how improving the efficiency of capital spending and of tax revenue collection affect growth and debt sustainability for three fast-growing Southeast Asian economies: Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. We show that a gradual public investment profile is more favorable than front-loading capital spending because we assume governments are able to gradually learn how to invest more efficiently, accelerating public capital accumulation and therefore growth. We discuss the pros and cons of alternative financing options and identify the financing mix that generates the best macroeconomic outcome. Sometimes overlooked, improving the efficiency of revenue collection over time may ease the burden of fiscal adjustment, achieving higher GDP growth with substantially lower debt-to-GDP ratios, and will help policymakers efficiently meet the challenge of addressing large infrastructure gaps while maintaining debt sustainability.
In this paper we examine the channels through which innovations to policy variablespolicy rates or monetary aggregates-affect such macroeconomic variables as output and inflation in Sri Lanka. The effectiveness of monetary policy instruments is judged through the prism of conventional policy channels (money/interest rate, bank lending, exchange rate and asset price channels) in VAR models. The timing and magnitude of these effects are assessed using impulse response functions, and through the pass-through coefficients from policy to money market and lending rates. Our results show that (i) the interest rate channel (money view) has the strongest Granger effect (helps predict) on output with a 0.6 percent decrease in output after the second quarter and a cumulative 0.5 percent decline within a three-year period in response to innovations in the policy rate; (ii) the contribution from the bank lending channel is statistically significant (adding 0.2 percentage point to the baseline effect of policy rates) in affecting both output and prices but with a lag of about five quarters for output and longer for prices; and (iii) the exchange rate and asset price channels are ineffective and do not have Granger effects on either output or prices. JEL Classification Numbers: E52, E58, F41, D53
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