Publications

The containment of health care expenditure is one of the major challenges facing public policymakers in the developed countries. This paper provides evidence of significant differences in the cross-country level of efficiency of health care expenditure, meaning that potential cost savings for the countries considered least efficient might be very high. Further, a significant relationship is found between the various health care policies and institutions in the OECD countries and the efficiency levels of health care systems. The findings are, however, highly sensitive to the efficiency-estimation methodology used.

The quarterly model of the Banco de España (MTBE) is a primary tool in the elaboration of medium term projections for the Spanish economy and for the quantification of the effects of different economic policy measures or economic shocks of a very diverse nature.
As part of the process of continuous development of this tool, a substantial revamping of the model has been recently carried out. Changes have been introduced both in the estimation of the coefficients - with an updated sample period that now extends to the end of 2008 - and in the methodology, affecting all aspects of the model. In addition, new explicative variables have been introduced in order to approximate the effects of agents' confidence and credit restrictions on spending decisions, which allow for a more fitting analysis of the recent evolution of the Spanish economy.

The view that central banks must play a greater role in preserving financial stability has gained considerable ground in the aftermath of the crisis and macroprudential policy has become a central pillar to deal with financial stability. The policy frame of macroprudential policy, its toolbox and interactions with other policies is not completely established yet,  though. In this context, Spain’s ten-year experience with its dynamic provision is a key reference. The analysis shows that, during the current financial crisis, dynamic provisions have proved useful to mitigate —to a limited extent— the build-up of risks and, above all, to provide substantial loss absorbency capacity to the financial institutions, suggesting that it could be an important tool for other banking systems. However, it is not the macroprudential panacea: it needs to be complemented and be consistent with the rest of policies,
either within the macro-prudential or in the broader context of macroeconomic management, including monetary policy. While there is a higher awareness of the contribution of monetary  policy to financial stability, its role is in practice limited. The case of the euro area is particularly telling in this respect: macro-financial imbalances developed in sectors where financial integration was low and the effects hence were confined to the domestic   economies. The asymmetry between a supranational monetary policy plus macroprudential surveillance and domestic implementation of macroprudential policies raises a set of issues which are worth exploring.

This paper seeks to estimate the potential output of the Spanish economy, using the
production function methodology standard in the literature. According to these estimates,
the growth of the potential output of the Spanish economy stood at around 3% in the
period 2000-2007, owing to the marked increase in the population and in the participation
rate and the fall in structural unemployment, as well as vigorous capital accumulation.
The contribution of these factors to potential output was reduced by the negative
evolution of total factor productivity. In addition, the economic crisis is estimated to have
had a significant negative impact on potential output, which has primarily taken the form of
a large increase in structural unemployment, a sharp slowdown in population growth, as a
consequence of the loss of momentum in immigrant inflows, and a reduction in the
contribution of the capital stock resulting from the impact of the crisis on investment.
As a result, the potential growth of the Spanish economy stands at around 1% during
the crisis years and in the years immediately thereafter, insofar as some of these negative
effects take place with a certain time lag. Lastly, in the medium term, the potential output
of the economy is estimated to recover progressively, once the effects of the crisis have
disappeared, reaching growth rates about 2%, against a background of negative rates
of change in the population of age 16-64, a smooth improvement in the NAIRU, a slight
recovery in investment and a higher contribution from TFP. The application of a strong
process of structural reforms could, however, significantly improve the growth prospects
of our economy.

This paper describes the methods of the third wave of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (EFF2008), paying special attention to the innovations relative to the previous waves. The EFF2008 was designed to give continuity to the information on household finances collected through the EFF2002 and the EFF2005. A desirable characteristic present in all three waves is the oversampling of wealthy households. This is achieved on the basis of the wealth tax through a blind system of collaboration between the National Statistics Institute and the Tax Office which preserves stringent tax confidentiality. An additional important characteristic of the EFF is that the second and third waves have a full panel component. Further, a refreshment sample by wealth stratum has been incorporated in those two waves to preserve cross-sectional representativity and overall sample size. The EFF is the only statistical source in Spain that allows the linking of incomes, assets, debts, and consumption at the household level. The usefulness of the information contained in a survey such as the EFF has led to the decision from the European system of central banks to conduct a household wealth survey in all euro area countries following a methodology similar to the EFF. Therefore, the EFF2008 will allow harmonized comparisons with the new European wealth surveys.

Latin America’s central banks were strengthened in the 1990s by independence laws, adoption of new policy regimes (foremost inflation targeting), and more transparent policy decisions bound by ex-ante rules and ex-post accountability. Central bank modernization - supported by significant fiscal adjustment and financial-sector strengthening - led most Latin American countries to converge to one-digit inflation rates and contributed to higher and more stable growth than in the past. Yet the region’s new policy framework was put to severe testing by the global financial crisis and recession. Quick and innovative policy responses by the region’s central banks helped domestic financial systems and the real economy to resist well the massive financial and real consequences of the banking crisis and recession in industrial countries. Empirical evidence reported here shows that the central banks’ new policy framework and policy response during the crisis dampened significantly the amplitude of the recession. Having weathered well the global financial crisis and recession, now Latin America’s central banks face a large array of policy challenges, which are reviewed in this lecture. Some are common to central banks in industrial and emerging economies, derived from the crisis itself and the issues it poses for improving the role of central banks in attaining more effectively both monetary and financial stability. Other challenges are idiosyncratic to emerging economies in the region (and elsewhere) that are facing renewed growth, high commodity prices, large capital inflows, and real exchange-rate appreciation.

This paper examines the growing relevance of emerging and developing economies for the global economy, paying special attention to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The paper also reviews the participation of these countries in some key multilateral institutions for global governance, and compares it to its actual economic weight. An enhanced role in the decision making process of these multilateral institutions is indeed one of the primary objectives of the BRIC group. Finally we elaborate on some other global questions in which these countries also have common interests -like international reserves accumulation, international trade and climate change negotiations- and in which their increased participation has to go hand in hand with a greater consideration of collective interests.