Recent Issues in Emerging-Economies Macroeconomics

In this paper, we summarize the recent advancement of emerging-economies macroeconomics. We begin with stylized facts and models of real business-cycles for emerging-market countries and then move onto the discussion of various issues associated with overborrowings and sovereign debts. The common feature of these models is that their analysis is mainly focused on the framework of RBC models for small open economies combined with financial frictions. We also discuss nominal features of emerging economies that are associated with the behavior of nominal exchange rate and foreign reserves observed during the recent global financial crisis, as well as the practice and impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policy measures. We also present some extensions of existing emerging-economies models that allow for the significant role of conventional monetary and fiscal policies. Our results can be summarized as follows. First, the canonical specification of recent models with pecuniary externalities is modified to allow for channels through which conventional monetary and fiscal policies can affect the degree of pecuniary externalities. Second, we attempt to explain the behavior of nominal exchange rate “going up elevators and coming down stairs” shown in emerging economies during periods of zero lower bounds on the short-term nominal interest rate. Third, we modify a prototypical model of sovereign debt to show the negative correlation between the maturity of foreign debt and the accumulation of foreign reserves when the level of foreign debt is substantially high.