Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Gravity equations have been widely used to infer trade flow effects of various institutional arrangements. We show that estimated gravity equations do not have a theoretical foundation. This implies both that estimation suffers from omitted variables bias and that comparative statics analysis is unfounded. We develop a method that (i) consistently and efficiently estimates a theoretical gravity equation and (ii) correctly calculates the comparative statics of trade frictions. We apply the method to solve the famous McCallum border puzzle. Applying our method, we find that national borders reduce trade between industrialized countries by moderate amounts of 20-50 percent.

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Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle

In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

This paper summarizes and explains the main events of the liquidity and credit crunch in 2007-08. Starting with the trends leading up to the crisis, I explain how these events unfolded and how four different amplification mechanisms magnified losses in the mortgage market into large dislocations and turmoil in financial markets.

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Deciphering the Liquidity and Credit Crunch 2007-08

We construct estimates of external assets and liabilities for 145 countries for the period 1970-2004. We describe our estimation methods and present key features of the data at the country and the global level. We focus on trends in net and gross external positions, and the composition of international portfolios, distinguishing between foreign direct investment, portfolio equity investment, official reserves, and external debt. We document the increasing importance of equity financing and the improvement in the external position for emerging markets, and the differing pace of financial integration between advanced and developing economies. We also show the existence of a global discrepancy between estimated foreign assets and liabilities, and identify the asset categories that account for this discrepancy.

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The External Wealth of Nations Mark Ii: Revised and Extended Estimates of Foreign Assets and Liabilities, 1970-2004

Before the crisis, there were strong arguments for reducing global imbalances. As a result of the crisis, there have been significant changes in saving and investment patterns across the world and imbalances have narrowed considerably. Does this mean that imbalances are a problem of the past? Hardly. The paper argues that there is an urgent need to implement policy changes to address the remaining domestic and international distortions that are a key cause of imbalances. Failure to do so could result in the world economy being stuck in "midstream," threatening the sustainability of the recovery.

Global Imbalances: In Midstream?

In mid-2008, the real effective exchange rate of the dollar was close to its minimum level for the past 4 decades. At the same time, however, the U.S. trade and current account deficits remain large and, absent a significant correction in coming years, would contribute to a further accumulation of U.S. external liabilities. The paper discusses the tension between these two aspects of the dollar assessment, and what factors can help reconcile them. It focuses in particular on the terms of trade, adjustment lags, and measurement issues related to both the real effective exchange rate and the current account balance.

Fundamentals at Odds? The US Current Account Deficit and The Dollar

A number of East Asian and Latin American countries have beeen the recipients of a large portion of total international capital flows to developing countries, both in the late seventies/early eighties and in the early nineties. These inflows have financed persistent current account imbalances, as well as the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves. A number of recent studies have focused on potential early warning indicators in predicting exchange rate, financial and balance-of-payments crises. This chapter contributes to this literature by examining the sustainability of current account deficits in three East Asian countries, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, and three Latin American countries, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, in the early 1980s and in the 1990s.

Current Account Deficits and Capital Flows in East Asia and Latin America: Are the Early Nineties Different From the Early Eighties

This paper documents the evolution of international financial integration since the global financial crisis using an updated dataset on external assets and liabilities, covering over 210 economies for the period 1970-2015. It finds that the growth in cross-border positions in relation to world GDP has come to a halt. This reflects much weaker capital flows to and from advanced economies, with diminished cross-border banking activity, and an increase in the weight of emerging economies in global GDP, as these economies have lower external assets and liabilities than advanced economies. Cross-border FDI positions have continued to expand, unlike positions in portfolio instruments and other investment. This expansion reflects primarily positions vis-a-vis financial centers, suggesting that the complexity of the corporate structure of large multinational corporations is playing an important role. The paper also explores the cross-country drivers of foreign ownership of domestic debt securities, highlighting in particular the role of the euro debt crisis in explaining its evolution.

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International Financial Integration in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a collapse in international travel and tourism. This paper explores how the cross-country impact of the pandemic relates to countries’ dependence on these activities as a source of revenue. It first documents the size of the shock to net revenues from international travel and tourism for the balance of payments, which for the median highly tourism-dependent economy exceeded 10 percentage points of GDP, leading to a sizable current account deterioration. Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that current account adjustment in 2020 relative to pre-crisis forecasts was driven to an important extent by the collapse in revenues and expenditures on international travel as well as by the collapse in oil prices. On the economic growth front, the paper shows that the share of tourism activities in GDP is the single most important predictor of the growth shortfall in 2020 triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, even when compared to a variety of measures of the severity of the pandemic. Author’s email: gmilesiferretti@brookings.edu. The author is greatly indebted to Serkan Arslanalp, Maria Borga, Daniel Leigh, Paulo Medas, Louise Sheiner, David Wessel, and participants at a seminar at the Brookings Institution for very useful suggestions, and to the World Economic Outlook team at the International Monetary Fund for their help with the data. Jimena Ruiz Castro and Manuel Alcala Kovalski provided excellent research assistance.

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti

Papers

Global Imbalances: In Midstream?

Fundamentals at Odds? The US Current Account Deficit and The Dollar

Current Account Deficits and Capital Flows in East Asia and Latin America: Are the Early Nineties Different From the Early Eighties

International Financial Integration in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis

The Travel Shock