Suchergebnisse

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) Defense Export Loan Guarantee (DELG) Program, focusing on: (1) the level of program activity to date; (2) the program's financial status; (3) other sources of financing available to borrowing countries; (4) comparing DELG Program characteristics with other U.S. government export financing programs; and (5) examining issues related to the planned fiscal year 1999 transfer of DELG Program responsibilities within DOD."

How effective are direct government policies for boosting exports? We answer this question with a structured overview of 34 studies covering 26 countries around the world, and in doing so, we provide nine findings. We show export boosting policies are heterogenenous by design and include export promotion policies, public grants for exporters, public export guarantee schemes, subsidised export loans, and randomised foreign market access programmes. Our review provides insights into policy effectiveness with respect to extensive and intensive export margins as well as firms' production function inputs and its outputs. Heterogeneity of effects across firm characteristics is emphasised and the discussion is enriched with new evidence on spillover effects from export boosting policies. Finally, we provide back-of-the-envelope calculations of aggregate macroeconomic effects and give recommendations for policymakers. Our findings show export boosting policies are relevant and proven-to-be-effective policy instruments.

Describes the goals of the Export-Import Bank of the US to keep trade flowing & growing to spur long-term economic growth, focusing on US-Latin American trade. As an export credit agency, its job is to provide financing to emerging markets. Free trade is advocated, & the Ex-Im Bank looks to play a role in helping expand the positive forces of globalization. Specific Latin American loan authorizations are cited, as well as other ways it has fostered the meeting of shared US-Latin American economic goals. J. Zendejas

We study the potential for introducing indexation on loans provided by multilateral lenders to LICs, and thus whether a reform of their lending policy is feasible and economically justified. To this end, we provide new evidence for a group of 40 IDA countries over the 1990-2010 period for three types of debt: i) foreign currency loans indexed to real GDP; ii) foreign currency loans indexed to the dollar value of exports; iii) inflation-indexed loans denominated in local currency. We find that both GDP indexation and domestic currency lending are feasible policies, since individual country risk could be easily diversified in a portfolio of loans to IDA countries. The estimation of CAPM beta coefficients suggests that, while the risk of export-indexed loans is difficult to hedge, loans indexed to GDP or denominated in local currencies could be introduced at current interest rates; their risk premium is no greater than one percent. The insurance that indexed debt might offer to LICs against macroeconomic shocks threatening their debt sustainability depends on the conditional covariances of GDP growth, real exchange-rate depreciation and net exports that we estimate as the covariances of the forecast errors obtained from a VAR model. The analysis shows that GDP-indexed or export-indexed loans would help to stabilize the debt ratio of the majority of IDA countries in our sample, but a larger number of them would benefit from a re-denomination of loans in local currency. A main lesson from our analysis is that a 'one size fits all solution' does not exist to the problem of stabilizing the debt ratio. This suggests that a reform of multilateral lending that is desirable to all LICs would be difficult to implement