Contenu du sommaire

The United States, architect of the post-war trading system, has become its most visible rule-breaker. The US refuses to renew the mandate of judges on the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Appellate Body, which means that WTO rules are no longer enforceable unless the US (or any other member) chooses to comply. The Biden Administration has shown no interest in new bilateral or regional trade deals. This paper adopts a historical perspective to examine the causes behind the turn in US trade policy and speculates about its future course. Even today, the US economy remains among the world's most open, public opinion supports trade and advocates of withdrawal from world markets are hard to find. Accordingly, interpreting the change of US trade policy as an outright embrace of protectionism is overly simple, in fact misleading. A more accurate interpretation is that US trade policy has changed, impelled – as it has been over two and a half centuries – by underlying forces. In this episode, it is the rise of China and its challenge to a US-led world order, high income inequality (combined with inadequate social safety nets), and climate change that force an adaptation of US trade policy. Not surprisingly, these forces create opportunities for calls for protection among powerful constituencies that can profit from it. This helps us understand Biden's policies, but it does not justify them: the present US trade policy is not the right response to these challenges. Past cycles of US trade policy suggest that another rethinking of US trade policy is possible and even likely, especially since there is no support for closing the US economy. Unfortunately, a return to US trade leadership is not in the cards any time soon, and when it comes, it may be too late to salvage the rules-based trading system.

We assess the impact of union bargaining power on inflation and employment under efficiency bargaining according to Mac Donald & Solow [1981]. We consider a Stackelberg game between the Central Bank and social partners (firms and unions). Firms and unions negotiate employment and nominal wage, while the Central Bank, which plays as leader, sets the inflation rate. We show that a decrease in union bargaining power tends to reduce nominal wage and employment. In such a context of a leader Central Bank, the optimal monetary policy consists in a higher optimal inflation rate to prevent a rise in unemployment. Moreover, we demonstrate that increasing the optimal inflation rate has more important effects when the Central Bank is weakly conservative. These results argue for reducing Central Bank conservatism to compensate for the macroeconomic impact of declining union bargaining power.

This paper uses cliometrics to explain the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and women's self-employment in Africa. More specifically, it studies the effect of the number of slaves exported during the transatlantic slave trade on the average rate of female self-employment from 1991 to 2019 using a cross-sectional model covering 51 countries. The results support the view that historical events have a hysteresis effect on the current characteristics of developing countries. We find that slavery is a determinant of women's self-employment in Africa and identify culture as a transmission channel. The relatively high sex ratio in Africa during the slave trade contributed to women's full participation in civil and social life, leading to a spirit of competence and resourcefulness that has been inculcated in African culture and norms and has been perpetuated over time, explaining their high rate of self-employment. The paper emphasizes the need to consider cultural and traditional specificities in economic policies aimed at addressing women's self-employment in Africa, which is primarily characterized by informal activities.

This article aims at analysing the empirical relationship between real merchandise imports per capita and real GDP per capita for a set of 17 affiliated and 35 sovereign small islands over the period 1970-2019. Noting the lack of long time series for GDP per capita contrary to imports per capita, the goal is to check whether real imports per capita could be considered as a good predictor for standards of living for the small islands world in accordance with the theoretical claims. To this regard, we test for the imports-led growth and the growth-led imports hypotheses by running in a panel data framework both the Toda-Yamamoto Granger causality test based on VAR modelling, and the Pooled Mean Group estimator based on ARDL modelling. Finally, bidirectional causality holds in the short and the long-run for the group of sovereign small islands, giving strong support to the two hypotheses. However, even if in the short-run bidirectional causality seems to exist, only the growth-led imports hypothesis is validated in the long-run for the affiliated small islands. Anyway, our results state that a high level of imports per capita could be considered as a good predictor for a high level of standards of living for small islands.

We propose a critical assessment of the Basel Committee's macro-prudential proposal to mitigate the pro-cyclicality of risk-sensitive capital regulations. We compare first the credittoGDP gap and other macroeconomic and financial variables in their ability to predict banking sector vulnerabilities. Then, based on a counterfactual empirical implementation, we test a statistical procedure aiming at identifying a set of triggers for countercyclical capital buffers. We test our proposal using data characterizing the South Africa banking sector. JEL Codes: G21; G28