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In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a fiscal devaluation (hereafter, FD), understood as a shift in taxation from labour to consumption, has been debated as a possible tool for restoring competitiveness, particularly in peripheral countries of the Eurozone. We contribute to this debate. Based on a set of panel and spatial panel models for the EU 27 over the period 1995–2014, we find that FD works, especially where economic activity is heavily subdued and in sectors more exposed on external competition. FD increases value added in exports, improves net exports, accelerates GDP and employment growth, and decelerates growth in labour costs. These effects are nonlinear; they are stronger in the members of the Eurozone and weaker in countries with either more coordinated or more centralised wage bargaining processes or more generous unemployment benefits. The magnitude of these effects is dampened by strict regulatory barriers: they are weaker in countries with higher barriers to entrepreneurship, trade and investment. Most importantly, FD is not a beggar thy neighbour policy, at least in the EU. In our sample, the aggregate demand (‘cooperative’) effect of unilateral FD, which is beneficial for neighbouring countries, outweighs by far the expenditure switching (‘competitive’) effect, which comes at the expense of other countries’ competitiveness. FD implemented in one country can benefit other countries, provided that they are strongly integrated in global value chains. These findings are robust to changes in the estimation methods, the sample composition, the set of explanatory variables and the selection of a spatial weight matrix.

Curbing climate change is gaining increasing consensus globally. While many countries seek to set carbon prices, significant price dispersion and policy stringency continue to raise concerns about competitiveness. To address this issue, the EU has proposed a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which aims to level the playing field by levying a carbon price on EU imports. Theoretically, this mechanism would reduce the competitiveness of developing countries' exports and, therefore, shift the environmental burden from developed regions to the emerging world. In this paper, we estimate the competitiveness and welfare impacts of the EU CBAM, based on the so-called multi-regional input-output approach. We quantify changes in the value of exports to the EU market upon CBAM implementation for both EU members and non-EU countries, plus the rest of the world. It is found that the EU CBAM will lead to a redistribution of competitiveness among countries and regions, while the effect is seen to be more pronounced in emissions-intensive and trade-intensive sectors. Moreover, a deeper sub-national-level analysis on China shows that, given its pervasive domestic production network, income losses in landlocked provinces exceed their export losses, contrasting with the pattern for trade-exposed provinces.

The premise of beggar-thy-neighbor policies and currency wars is that currency depreciations lead to export growth. This premise, however, is far from validated as the existing economic literature largely either fails to find significant trade flow effects of currency fluctuations or finds that these effects are only minor. We revisit the question of whether currency fluctuations are systematically associated with trade flows using rich and unique firm level Chinese customs data on China-US trade over the 2000 to 2011 period that allows us to consider firm involvement in processing trade and firm dynamics in both export and import markets. Our firm-level based estimation of trade elasticities suggest that the China-US trade balance strongly responds to changes in the CNY/USD rate. This finding is particularly pronounced when we distinguish between ordinary and processing firms. Our results thus suggest that the influence of exchange rates on trade flows is stronger than previously thought and add insights to the policy debate on beggar-thy-neighbor policies and currency wars by, at least in principle, validating the underlying premise of such policies.

The recent rise of populism and authoritarian politics has seen a turn from multilateralism and toward international disputes like that between the US and China. This paper uses a calibrated global macro model to assess the potential economic consequences of this conflict under explicit assumptions about monetary and fiscal policy. US unilateral protection emerges as “beggar thy neighbor” policy, the more so if new tariff revenue affords capital tax relief. China’s proportional losses are comparatively large and little mitigated by retaliation, which nonetheless constrains US net gains. Avoiding leakage by protecting against all sources causes substantial losses in third regions trading with China and the US.

We consider the fiscal multiplier and spillover in an environment in which two countries are caught simultaneously in a liquidity trap. Using a standard New Open Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) model, an optimizing two-country sticky price model, we show that the fiscal multiplier and spillover are contrary to those predicted in textbook economics. For the country with government expenditure, the fiscal multiplier exceeds one, the currency depreciates, and the terms of trade worsen. The fiscal spillover is negative if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption is less than one and positive if the parameter is greater than one. Incomplete stabilization of marginal costs due to the existence of the zero lower bound is a crucial factor in understanding the effects of fiscal policy in open economies.

We study how small open economies can escape from deflation and unemployment in a situation where the world economy is permanently depressed. Building on the framework of Eggertsson et al (2016), we show that the transition to full employment and at-target inflation requires real and nominal depreciation of the exchange rate. However, because of adverse income and valuation effects from real depreciation, the escape can be beggar thy self, raising employment but actually lowering welfare. We show that as long as the economy remains financially open, domestic asset supply policies or reducing the effective lower bound on policy rates may be ineffective or even counterproductive. However, closing domestic capital markets does not necessarily enhance the monetary authorities' ability to rescue the economy from stagnation.

This paper proposes a channel through which increased openness to international trade can increase a country's long-run incentive to create inflation. The theoretical justifcation for this channel is the well known "beggar thy neighbor" incentive, and its dominance relies on a monetary authority's ability to commit to policy as well as the asymmetric effects of the underlying frictions in the model across domestic and foreign households. Comparing data from the 1973-1987 period and the 1988-2002 period, I Find evidence that the effect of openness on inflation is positive among developed countries whose monetary policy can be approximated by commitment and that the inflationary bias of openness is dampened by the degree of imperfect competition and the inelasticity of labor supply within the country.

The United States is a sovereign country that has the right to follow its own monetary policy. By an accident of history, since 1945 it is also the center of the world dollar standard—which remains surprisingly robust to the present day. So the choice of monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve can strongly affect its neighbors for better or for worse. Beginning with the Nixon shock in 1971, American policy makers have frequently ignored foreign complaints. But by ignoring feedback effects from the rest of the world, the Fed has made both the world and American economies less stable. The most recent example is the Fed’s policy of setting short-term interest rates close zero to since mid 2008, and then compounding this effect in late 2010 by “quantitative easing” designed to drive down long rates as well. At the November G-20 meeting in Seoul, foreign officials complained vociferously of hot money inflows from the United States creating inflationary pressure. Ironically, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy also impedes bank lending within the United States itself while seriously weakening other American financial institutions—such as insurance companies and pension funds.

In recent policy debates some have argued that expansionary monetary policy in Japan can increase real output in Japan and in Japan's neighbors, while others have warned that it is a beggar-thy-neighbor policy. In this paper we estimate structural vector autoregressions to assess the effects of Japanese monetary policy shocks. We find that the effects of Japanese monetary policy shocks on macroeconomic variation in East Asia have been modest and difficult to reconcile with the beggar-thy-neighbor view. We estimate that the Asian crisis was preceded by expansionary monetary policy shocks in Japan, but we fail to find support for the view that these shocks contributed to the crisis.

A vertical chain of production and trade along this chain have been found to be a characteristic feature of globalized markets. This paper examines how a multistage production process that involves more than one country affects the transmission of monetary policy changes. We assume that imported and domestic inputs are required to produce final consumption goods. Monetary policy may have adverse beggar-thyself effects if the mutual dependence between countries is considerably high. The foreign country benefits from a home monetary expansion unless the competitiveness of markets is too low.

International spillovers and exchange rate dynamics are examined in a two-country dynamic optimizing model that allows for home-product bias in consumption patterns: at given relative prices the ratio of home goods consumed to foreign goods consumed is higher in the home country. The setup nests Obstfeld and Rogoff (1995), who assume identical tastes. With home bias, results are different in three ways. When preferences are biased, the wealth transfers associated with current account imbalances induce movements in the real exchange rate and produce large short-run and small long-run deviations from consumption-based purchasing power parity. With home bias, interest rates, both real and nominal, can differ across countries; relatedly, home bias is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Dornbusch (1976) type exchange rate overshooting. Finally, in this model the welfare effects of expansionary monetary policy depend not only on world demand but also on the expenditure-switching effect of an exchange rate depreciation; monetary policy is 'beggar-thy-neighbor' if individuals have strong preferences for domestic products, but can be 'beggar-thyself' if, instead, imported goods are preferred.

Variable levies on agricultural products are justified by policymakers as a protection against imported volatility. This position is challenged by economists who argue that variable levies accentuate the world market volatility and can only buy stability for some countries at the expense of others. As shown in this paper, it is possible to design a system of variable levies that protects against imported volatility without exporting the home-grown volatility. Thus, variable levies do not necessarily beggar thy neighbour.

This paper develops a general framework to analyze the impact of monetary shocks in an open economy, focusing on the role of the degree of substitutability between goods produced in different countries. We extend the contributions by Obstfeld and Rogoff [Obstfeld, M., Rogoff, K., 1995. Exchange rate dynamics redux. Journal of Political Economy 103, 624–659] and Corsetti and Pesenti [Corsetti, G., Pesenti, P., 1997. Welfare and Macroeconomic Interdependence, NBER Working Paper 6307] to show that the welfare impact differs across countries when the degree of substitutability between goods produced in different countries is different from the degree of substitutability between goods produced in the same country. A shock that would be beneficial in a closed economy can have an adverse ‘beggar-thyself’ effect in the country where it takes place, or an adverse ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ effect on its neighbor.

In this paper, I exploit the cross-sectional and time-series variation in RD the estimated elasticity is negative, above unity (in absolute value), and statistically significant - a finding quite similar to that found by previous studies based on alternative data. Unlike previous studies, however, I then add the external R&D user cost to the regressions. I find the external-cost elasticity is positive and significant, raising concerns about whether having state-level R&D tax credits on top of federal credits is socially desirable. More importantly, I find the aggregate R&D price elasticity - the difference between the internal- and external-cost elasticities - is far smaller than previously estimated. In fact, the preferred specification yields a zero aggregate elasticity, suggesting a zero-sum game among states and raising questions about the efficacy of R&D tax credits more broadly.

Mandated generic commodity promotion programs funded by commodity taxes, called check-offs, are important and controversial. Previous studies of benefits, and legislated requirements for evaluation, have focused on the own-producer effects of promotion. They have disregarded the costs or benefits experienced by producers of commodities not covered by the program but affected by it either directly or because of induced price changes. In this paper, theoretical models are developed for a case where two producer groups each promote their own commodity, and the two commodities are closely related in consumption. In the likely case, promotion of each commodity has a positive own-commodity producer welfare effect and a negative cross-commodity producer welfare effect, and each producer group will spend less on promotion if they take effects on other producers into account than if they consider only the within-group welfare effects; accordingly, from a broader social perspective, commodity programs are likely to overspend on promotion. An application uses 1994 data on prices, consumption, and advertising expenditures on U.S. beef and pork to illustrate the effects of generic advertising of beef and pork, taking account of cross-commodity effects of advertising and price changes. We quantify the beggar-thy-neighbour non-cooperative outcome and the joint optimum, and discuss the policy implications of the comparison.