This book examines the macroeconomic and regulatory impact of domestic and international shocks on the South African economy resulting from the 2009 financial crisis. It also assesses the impact of the US economy’s eventual recovery from the crisis and the prospect of higher US interest rates in future. Told in three parts, the book explores associations between economic growth, policy uncertainty and the key domestic and international transmission channels, and transmission effects, of global financial regulatory and domestic macro-economic uncertainties on subdued and volatile economic recovery, financial channels, lending rate margins, and credit growth. The book concludes by extending its focus to the role of US monetary policy, capital flows and rand/US dollar volatility on the South African economy.

The world economy is experiencing a very strong but uneven recovery, with many emerging market and developing economies facing obstacles to vaccination. The global outlook remains uncertain, with major risks around the path of the pandemic and the possibility of financial stress amid large debt loads. Policy makers face a difficult balancing act as they seek to nurture the recovery while safeguarding price stability and fiscal sustainability. A comprehensive set of policies will be required to promote a strong recovery that mitigates inequality and enhances environmental sustainability, ultimately putting economies on a path of green, resilient, and inclusive development. Prominent among the necessary policies are efforts to lower trade costs so that trade can once again become a robust engine of growth. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Global Economic Prospects. The Global Economic Prospects is a World Bank Group Flagship Report that examines global economic developments and prospects, with a special focus on emerging market and developing economies, on a semiannual basis (in January and June). Each edition includes analytical pieces on topical policy challenges faced by these economies.

Quantitative models and computer-based tools are essential for making decisions in today's business environment. These tools are of particular importance in the rapidly growing area of supply chain management. This volume is a unified effort to provide a systematic summary of the large variety of new issues being considered, the new set of models being developed, the new techniques for analysis, and the computational methods that have become available recently. The volume's objective is to provide a self-contained, sophisticated research summary - a snapshot at this point of time - in the area of Quantitative Models for Supply Chain Management. While there are some multi-disciplinary aspects of supply chain management not covered here, the Editors and their contributors have captured many important developments in this rapidly expanding field. The 26 chapters can be divided into six categories. Basic Concepts and Technical Material (Chapters 1-6). The chapters in this category focus on introducing basic concepts, providing mathematical background and validating algorithmic tools to solve operational problems in supply chains. Supply Contracts (Chapters 7-10). In this category, the primary focus is on design and evaluation of supply contracts between independent agents in the supply chain. Value of Information (Chapters 11-13). The chapters in this category explicitly model the effect of information on decision-making and on supply chain performance. Managing Product Variety (Chapters 16-19). The chapters in this category analyze the effects of product variety and the different strategies to manage it. International Operations (Chapters 20-22). The three chapters in this category provide an overview of research in the emerging area of International Operations. Conceptual Issues and New Challenges (Chapters 23-27). These chapters outline a variety of frameworks that can be explored and used in future research efforts. This volume can serve as a graduate text, as a reference for researchers and as a guide for further development of this field.

We study the use of foreign exchange (FX) intervention as an additional policy instrument in an environment with learning, where agents infer the central bank policy rules from its policy actions. Under full information, a central bank focused on stabilizing output and inflation can achieve better outcomes by using FX intervention as an additional policy tool. Under policy uncertainty, where agents perceive that monetary policy may also have exchange rate stabilization goals, the use of FX intervention entails a trade-off, reducing output volatility while increasing inflation volatility. While having an additional policy tool is always beneficial, we find that the optimal magnitude of intervention is higher in monetary policy regimes with lower uncertainty. These results indicate that the benefits of using FX intervention as an additional stabilization tool are greater in regimes where monetary policy is credibly focused on output and inflation stabilization.

While global uncertainty—measured by the VIX—has proven to be a robust global “push” factor of international capital flows, there has been no systematic study assessing the role of country-specific uncertainty as a key (pull and push) factor of international capital flows. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature by examining the effects of country-specific uncertainty shocks on cross-border banking flows using the confidential Bank for International Settlements Locational Banking Statistics data. The dyadic structure of this data allows to disentangle supply and demand factors and to better identify the effect of uncertainty shocks on cross-border banking flows. The results of this analysis suggest that: (i) uncertainty is both a push and pull factor that robustly predicts a decrease in both outflows (retrenchment) and inflows (stops); (ii) global banks rebalance their lending towards safer foreign borrowers from local borrowers when facing higher uncertainty; (iii) this rebalancing occurs only towards advanced economies (flight to quality), but not emerging market economies.

We constructed a new index of global uncertainty using the first principal component of the stock market volatility for the largest 15 economies. We evaluate the impact of global uncertainty on the global economy using the new global database from Global Economic Indicators (DGEI), Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Global uncertainty shocks are less frequent than those observed in data on the U.S. economy. Global uncertainty shocks are associated with a sharp decline in global inflation, global growth and in the global interest rate (based on official/policy interest rates set by central banks). Our decomposition of global uncertainty shocks shows that global financial uncertainty shocks are more important than non-financial shocks. Over the period 1981 to 2014 global financial uncertainty forecasts 18.26% and 14.95% of the variation in global growth and global inflation respectively. The non-financial uncertainty shocks have insignificant effects on global growth. The model for global variables shows more protracted and substantial negative effects of uncertainty on growth and inflation than does a panel model estimating associations of local country-level variables. This outcome is reversed for the effect of uncertainty on official interest rate.

Motivated by the literature on the capital asset pricing model, we decompose the uncertainty of a typical forecaster into common and idiosyncratic uncertainty. Using individual survey data from the Consensus Forecasts over the period of 1989-2014, we develop monthly measures of macroeconomic uncertainty covering 45 countries and construct a measure of global uncertainty as the weighted average of country-specific uncertainties. Our measure captures perceived uncertainty of market participants and derives from two components that are shown to exhibit strikingly different behavior. Common uncertainty shocks produce the large and persistent negative response in real economic activity, whereas the contributions of idiosyncratic uncertainty shocks are negligible.