Trade Surpluses, the Exchange Rate, and Open Macroeconomic Policies Including the Expansion of Domestic Demand -- Theory and Empirical Studies

我们为期两年的项目有两个主要目标。一是研究公开的宏观经济问题的基本机制，例如贸易不平衡的原因、资本流动的影响和观察到的汇率波动，并规定最能稳定经济的适当政策。另一个目的是建立一个宏观计量经济学模型，以便捕捉这些政策的实际影响。为了实现这些目标，我们在过去两年中进行了多次会议和热烈讨论。我们的宏观计量经济模型构造得如此紧凑，但它却恰当地适应了经济的实际行为。这一简约原则使我们首先建立了由大约30个方程组成的CORE模型，并在对特定经济部门特别感兴趣时添加了一组方程。每个扇区仅通过CORE模型连接。事实证明，这是有效的，因为模型的性能显示出的政策模拟结果并不比标准的大规模计量经济学模型的结果更令人满意，而且小规模模型允许使用相当复杂的计量经济学技术，而这些技术有时是经济理论要求所必需的。在个体研究方面，大多数成员都对外汇市场预期形成的主导作用感兴趣。有时，自我实现的预期会产生投机泡沫，进而产生巨额资本流动和国际收支失衡。然而，不幸的是，这方面并没有完全纳入我们的宏观计量经济模型。这为我们在不久的将来更新和改进我们的宏观计量经济模型提供了激励和需求。

Our 2-year project had two main aims. One was to study the fundamental mechanisms of open macroeconomic issues such as the causes of trade imbalances, the effects of capital mobility, and the observed volatility of the exchange rate movements and prescribe proper policies which best stabilize the economy. The other aim was to construct a macroeconometric model so as to capture the actual impacts of these policies. In order to attain these aims, we had a number of meetings and heated discussions in the past two years.Our macroeconometric model was so constructed as to be compact in size and yet it fits the actual behavior of the economy appropriately. This parsimonious principle led us to build, first, the CORE model which consists of about 30 equations, and to add a block of equations when a specific sector of the economy is of particular interest. Each sector is connected only through the CORE model. This turned out to work efficiently in the senses that the performances of the model showed no less satisfactory results of policy simulations than those of the standard large-scale econometric models and that the small-scale model allows for rather sophisticated econometric techniques that are sometimes essential from the requirement by the economic theory.As for the individual research, most menbers shared the interests in the dominant roles played by the expectations formation in the foreign exchange markets.Sometimes, self-fulfilling expectations generate speculative bubbles and they may in turn generate huge capital flows and the balance-of-payments imbalances. Unfortunately, however, this aspect was not fully incorporated into our macroeconometric model. This provides us incentives and needs to update and improve our macroeconometric model in the near future.