• East Asian Economic Review
• /
• v.22 no.1
• /
• pp.55-73
• /
• 2018

The substantial slowdown of economic growth since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 is rekindling debate on whether developing Asia should use fiscal expansion to boost aggregate demand. A key factor in the debate is the effectiveness of countercyclical fiscal policy in the region. The global crisis, as well as the fiscal stimulus packages implemented by developing Asian countries at that time, give some clues to this important issue. The region weathered the global crisis well and experienced a robust V-shaped recovery. According to conventional wisdom, the fiscal stimulus packages put in place by Asian governments played a key role in the region's recovery. The central objective of this paper is to empirically test this wisdom by using cross-country panel data. Our main finding is that the stimulus has had a limited but positive impact on developing Asia's output during the global crisis. This lends some support to the notion that countercyclical fiscal policy can help the region cope with severe external shocks. The broader, more fundamental implication for regional policymakers is that the region's long-standing commitment to fiscal discipline can yield significant benefits beyond macroeconomic stability. An important consequence of this commitment - relatively healthy fiscal balance sheets - enabled the region's governments to quickly and decisively embark upon fiscal stimulus programs.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
• /
• v.35 no.4
• /
• pp.63-94
• /
• 2013

This study aims to understand the long-run movement of volatility in Korean stock market by decomposing stock volatility into the long-lived and the short-lived components. In addition, I analyze how the low-frequency movement of stock market volatility is related to changes in macroeconomic conditions. The volatility decomposition is made based on the GARCH-MIDAS model, in which the long-lived volatility is constructed based on the combination of realized volatilities (RVs). The results show that the long-lived volatility contains information of up to 3~4 years of past RVs. In addition, the changes in the long-lived volatility can explain about two thirds of volatility changes in the Korean stock market from 1994 to 2009. Meanwhile, the low-frequency movement in the market volatility can be related to changes in macroeconomic conditions. The analysis shows that the stock market volatility appears to be countercyclical while showing a positive correlation with the inflation. In addition, the stock market volatility tends to rise as macroeconomic uncertainty increases. These results imply that macroeconomic policies aiming at economic stabilization could contribute to reduction in the stock market volatility.