Lessons from the Russian Meltdown: The Economics of Soft Legal Constraints

On August 17, 1998, Russia defaulted on its domestic public debt, declared a moratorium on the private banks' foreign liabilities, which was equivalent to an outright default, and abandoned its exchange rate regime. The depth of the Russian meltdown shocked the international markets, and precipitated a period of serious financial instability. It is important to understand the roots of such a crisis to learn about possible lessons on both issues of bank supervision and international stability. While the visible cause of the crisis was an unsustainable fiscal deficit couples with massive capital flight, the critical question concerns the origin of such circumstances. This paper argues that the structure of individual incentives in the Russian legal context, compounded by the exceptional support granted by international institutions to Russia, explains the cycle of nonpayment, capital flight and fiscal unbalances leading to the dramatic 1998 crisis. We offer an interpretative model of noncompliance, cash-stripping and rational collective nonpayment, which led to the fiscal and banking crisis and ultimately to a complete meltdown. In our view, the banking sector was already insolvent prior to the crisis, and contributed directly and indirectly to it. The last section of the paper puts forward a radical medium-term policy proposal for a stable banking and payment system for Russia. Russia needs to create a basic foundation for savings and intermediation by asset restrictions and market segmentation, crude but effective rules used in all underdeveloped systems to restrain asset stripping and opportunism. Concretely, we propose a cautious extension of deposit insurance away from the monopolistic Sberbank and towards a narrow banking layer. The proposal also proposes to restore charter value in the commercial banking sector.

State ownership - a residual role?

The author reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of state ownership. He argues that a gradual transfer of operational control and financial claims over state assets remains the most desirable goal, but it needs to be paced to avoid regulatory capture, and the capture of the privatization process itself. In addition, the speed of transfer should be timed on the progress in developing a strong regulatory governance system, to which certain residual rights of intervention must be vested. In many countries institutional weakness limits regulatory capacity and reliability, yet the author's conclusion is that in such environments, maintaining state control undermines the very emergence of institutional capacity, and so the balance should tip toward progressively less direct state control. After all, what are"institutions"if not governance mechanisms with some degree of autonomy from both political and private interests? The gradual creation of institutions partially autonomous from political power must become central to the development of an optimal mode of regulatory governance. The author offers some suggestions about creating maximum accountability in regulatory governance, in particular creating an internal control system based on a rotating board representative of users, producers, and civic organizations, to be elected by a process involving frequent reporting and disclosure.Decentralization,National Governance,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,National Governance,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Governance Indicators,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management

Estimating the effects of fiscal policy in OECD countries

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on GDP, prices and interest rates in 5 OECD countries, using a structural Vector Autoregression approach. Its mains results can be summarized as follows; 1) The effects of fiscal policy on GDP and its components have become substantially weaker in the last 20 years; 2) The tax multipliers tend to be negative but small; 3) Once plausible values of the price elasticity of governments spending are imposed, the negative effects of government spending on prices that have been frequently estimated become positive, although usually small and not always significant; 4) Government spending shocks have significant effects on the real short interest rate, but uncertain signs; 5) Net tax shocks have very small effects on prices; 6) The US is an outlier in many dimensions; US responses to fiscal shocks are often not representative of the average OECD country included in this sample. JEL Classification: E62, H30