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Crisis Years (crisis + year)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	75%

Selected Abstracts

The contribution of domestic and external factors to emerging market currency crises: an early warning systems approach,

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FINANCE & ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2007
Steven B. Kamin
Abstract In this paper, a modified ,early warning system' (EWS) approach is developed to identify the roles of domestic and external factors in emerging market crises. Several probit models of currency crises were estimated for 26 emerging market countries. These models were used to identify the separate contributions to the probabilities of crisis of domestic and external variables. We found that, relative to domestic factors, adverse external shocks and large external imbalances contributed little to the average estimated probability of crisis in emerging market countries, but accounted for much more of the spikes in the probability of crisis estimated to occur during actual crisis years. We interpret these results to suggest that while, on average over time, domestic factors have tended to contribute to much of the underlying vulnerability of emerging market countries, adverse swings in external factors may have been important in pushing economies ,over the edge' and into currency crisis. In consequence, the costs of giving up exchange rate flexibility through adoption of strongly fixed exchange rate regimes,e.g. currency boards or dollarization,may be quite high for some countries. Published in 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Food Security in China and Contingency Planning: the Significance of Grain Reserves

JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2006
Hendrik J. Bruins
China is inhabited by ca 20 percent of the world population, but has only 7 percent of global arable land and only 6.6 percent of global freshwater resources. These unfavourable relationships between population size and the basic resources for food production , soil and water , require careful food security and contingency planning by the Chinese authorities. The country has been remarkably successful in raising its food production since 1949 at a faster rate (400 percent) than the increase in its population (240 percent). This has basically been achieved by increasing the yields per unit area with enhanced fertilizer use, as the total size of arable land has been decreasing in recent years. Though China attempts to be largely self-sufficient in food grain production, two possible contingency scenarios are suggested that might cause grave problems: (1) severe multi-annual drought; (2) reduced chemical fertilizer manufacturing. If Chinese food production would drop as a result by, say, 33 percent, famine, the dreaded scourge throughout Chinese history, might recur. A shortage of ca 150 million tons of food grains cannot easily be buffered by the volume of food grains annually traded on the world market, ca 240 million tons. Much of this amount tends to be committed already to traditional buyers, as most countries in the world have to import food grains. Cash reserves, therefore, may not guarantee food purchases, because global grain reserves are limited and declining. The formation and maintenance of large internal food grain reserves in China, common in its tradition and ancient history, seem the only realistic contingency planning strategy to avert famine in case of a severe decline in its food production in future crisis years. [source]

Loan Loss Provisions by Banks in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT & ACCOUNTING, Issue 1 2007
Li Li Eng
This paper studies loan loss disclosures by banks in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore for the period 1993 through 2000. We find that unexpected loan loss provisions are positively related to bank stock returns and future cash flows. This indicates that Asian bank managers increase loan loss provisions to signal favorable cash flow prospects, and bank investors bid bank stock prices up when unexpected provisions are positive. These results are consistent with those obtained by Wahlen (1994) for US banks. We also examine the impact of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 on the loan loss variables. The results indicate that the association between the unexpected loan loss provisions and bank stock returns and future cash flows was significantly lower in the crisis years, relative to the non-crisis period. Evidently, discretionary loan loss provisions had no signaling value during the crisis. This suggests that macroeconomic uncertainty influenced the strategic behavior of Asian bank managers and investors. [source]

Economic Liberalization and Smallholder Productivity in Tanzania.

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 3 2005
From Promised Success to Real Failure
In the mid-1980s, Tanzania adopted a programme for economic liberalization of the entire economy, including agriculture. After pressure from the IMF and the World Bank in particular, but also from most of the bilateral donors, agricultural producer and input prices were decontrolled, panterritorial prices were abolished, subsidies were removed and trade in agricultural products and inputs was to a large extent taken over by private traders. The international donor community promised that economic liberalization would provide a strong stimulus to Tanzanian agriculture, resulting in increasing yields, increased labour productivity, rising agricultural production and higher incomes. However, available data show that, as far as food crop production is concerned, this promise has not been fulfilled. Even compared to the ,crisis years' 1979,1984, labour productivity, yields and production per capita of food grains stagnated or declined up to the end of the 1990s. Some causes of this failure are discussed. [source]