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Purpose – This chapter investigates the role of infrastructure aid to developing countries for determining the effect on national income and consumer welfare. The chapter further demonstrates the conditions for the Dutch disease effect by decomposing the output effects of infrastructure aid into the initial factor-saving effect, factor-substitution effect and nontraded good effect.

Methodology/approach – This chapter extends the Heckscher−Ohlin model to a 3×2 case with two traded goods and a nontraded good, and derives comparative static results on factor prices, the price of nontraded goods, foreign exchange rate, sectoral outputs, and national income and consumer welfare.

Findings – It is shown that for a recipient country, infrastructure aid to either the export or import sector necessarily raises national income and consumer welfare, whereas the same aid to the nontraded good sector does not affect national income but raises consumer welfare. Infrastructure aid may lead to a Dutch disease effect via its three effects on industrial outputs: the initial factor-saving effect, factor-substitution effect and nontraded good effect.

Research limitations/implications – This chapter considers infrastructure capital as a public input, but it is devoid of analysis of inter-industrial spillover effects that the infrastructure capital generates to other sectors.

Practical implications – This chapter reveals several aspects of infrastructure aid that the practitioners of aids must consider.

This paper evaluates the commonly used CPI and WPI proxies for the real exchange rate by comparing them to new measures constructed from a different data series of traded and nontraded goods prices. The tests provide mixed evidence in favor of using the general price indexes to construct measures of the real exchange rate.

This paper investigates the role of infrastructure aid to developing countries beset with unemployment. Since unemployment persists in most developing countries with chronic foreign debts, the impact of infrastructure aid is analyzed using an extended Harris–Todaro model with two traded good sectors and a nontraded good sector. The paper delineates sufficient conditions under which infrastructure aid may lead to a Dutch disease effect.

This paper's purpose is to investigate the claim that capital taxes imposed by a subnational government reduce the economic competitiveness of the geographic area in which these taxes are imposed.

A two‐region, four‐good, three‐factor computational general equilibrium model of the USA is constructed. Simulations are performed to represent US state governments replacing wage taxes with capital taxes.

Household utilities rose when wage taxes were replaced by capital taxes, contradicting the conventional wisdom that capital taxes are harmful to a region's residents.

As with all computational economic models, there are simplifications in this paper's model that abstract from reality and may limit the applicability of model results to the real world.

Subnational governments need not shy away from capital taxes when funding government programs.

This paper contributes to the investigation of subnational tax incidence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which a flexible exchange rate system is able to function given a least developed economy where financial markets are inactive and economic growth is low.

A theoretical general equilibrium model is developed to examine the determinacy of a flexible exchange rate system on a small open market economy on the verge of subsistence. Using data from Sudan, an empirical analysis is conducted to find support for the theoretical results.

The theoretical analysis finds that in economies on the verge of subsistence with inactive financial markets, a flexible exchange rate system is indeterminate and thus will not work. In support of the theoretical results, the empirical analysis indicates that the financial deepening of an economy has a significant positive impact on the determinacy of the exchange rate.

The robustness of the empirical results would be strengthened by examining the significance of financial deepening on exchange rates for additional economies with a large subsistence sector beyond Sudan.

A policy recommendation for economies on the verge of subsistence such as Sudan is to develop their financial institutions in order to increase their competitiveness in the exchange rate market. Moreover, future empirical studies on the impact of exchange rate changes should include monetary variables in order to reflect the degree of an economy's financial market advancement.

The paper illustrates that under conditions of subsistence, general equilibrium models of devaluation are determinant only when supply functions are based on absolute prices and not relative prices.

Whether stock returns are linked to exchange rate changes and whether foreign exchange risk is priced in a domestic context are less conclusive and thus still subject to a great debate. The purpose of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on these two inter‐related issues, which are critical to investors and corporate risk management.

This paper applies two different econometric approaches: Nonlinear Seemingly Unrelated Regression (NLSUR) via Hansen's Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) and multivariate GARCH in mean (MGARCH‐M) to examine the exchange rate exposure and its pricing.

Using industry data for Japan, similar to previous studies, foreign exchange risk is not priced based on the test of an unconditional two‐factor asset pricing model. However, strong evidence of time‐varying foreign exchange risk premium and significant exchange rate betas are obtained based on the tests of conditional asset pricing models using MGARCH‐M approach where both conditional first and second moments of industry returns and risk factors are estimated simultaneously.

The strong empirical evidence found in this study implies that corporate currency hedging not only results in more stable cash flows for a firm, but also reduces its cost of capital, and hence is justifiable.

This paper conducts an in‐depth investigation regarding the exchange rate exposure and its pricing by utilizing two different econometric approaches: NLSUR via Hansen's GMM and MGARCH‐M. In doing so, a more reliable conclusion about the exchange rate exposure and its pricing can be drawn.

Nearly all international trade takes place in middle products, rather than in finished goods as it is assumed in most models of international trade theory. Recognition of this fact has some far-reaching consequences for the measurement of real value added, real domestic income, and productivity, and it brings forward the role of a number of related, yet distinct, key price ratios: the terms of trade, the real exchange rate, and the trading gains. Production theory, rather than consumer theory, is therefore the appropriate setting for analyzing issues such as openness, trade imbalances, and income distribution.

The paper aims at developing a theoretical model for de facto dollarized small open economies focusing on currency substitution and nominal wages indexation to the exchange rate.

The analysis is performed in a general equilibrium “New Open Economy Macroeconomics” framework with nominal rigidities and imperfect competition in the nontraded good sector.

The paper finds that a dollar‐indexed economy with low degrees of payments/financial dollarization could experience higher costs in terms of exchange rate and output fluctuations when nominal shocks dominate real shocks, making stabilization programs more difficult to achieve in a rapid and less costly way.

The speed of adjustment of macro variables is faster in the highly dollarized economy as a response to a higher and more volatile inflation rate. A higher level of financial dollarization increases the frequency of domestic prices and wages revisions to nominal exchange rate shocks. This might explain, in turn, why nominal disturbances are shorter lived in the higher dollarized economies, and the asymmetry between financial and real dollarization

Contrary to the “conventional wisdom” that predicts a positive relationship between the degrees of dollarization and the exchange rate pass‐through, our model shows that the degree of dollarization and the degree of dollar indexation are not necessarily the same or even correlated.

Purpose – This chapter examines whether a small open economy in the presence of a nontraded good produced under a monopolistically competitive market and foreign capital inflow can raise its national welfare by adopting trade liberalization coupled with foreign economic aid.

Methodology/approach – The chapter employs a general equilibrium, comparative static analysis of a small open economy involving two factors and two industries.

Findings – It is shown that an import tariff can raise the welfare of a country or impoverish it, depending on the production and trade structures and preferences of the country, but foreign economic aid is always welfare enhancing. Thus, even when a tariff reduction reduces national welfare, the government still has an incentive to adopt the policy combination of trade liberalization and foreign economic aid.

Originality/value of paper – The results obtained explain a widely recognized fact that economic aid by developed donor countries, trade liberalization and capital market liberalization typically take place simultaneously in developing recipient countries.