Essays on Economic Crisis and Economic Reform
"This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay is titled ""The Political Business Cycle, National Election and Currency Crisis."" Previous studies concentrated only on economic variables and did not pay much attention to institutional or political variables as possible indicators of currency crisis. After controlling economic variables which were argued to have a close relationship with currency crisis in the past studies, I found that the national election had a significant impact on the currency crisis. ""The Recovery Process from Currency Crisis"" is the title of the second essay. I examined the movement of several economic variables after the currency crisis and tried to find a general recovery pattern. I found that the combination of expansionary fiscal policy and austere monetary policy is the best policy mix for the recovery process. It turned out that the crisis had no negative impact on the long-term growth trend and the consumption smoothing theory held in the long-run. The third essay is titled ""The Initiation of Economic Reform: the Cases of Public Enterprise Reform and Trade Liberalization."" This part tried to find under what conditions governments initiate and maintain market-oriented reforms, focusing particularly on the public enterprise reform and trade liberalization. By using mainly the ""Country Profile"" and ""Country Report"" from the Economist Intelligence Unit, we constructed the initiation of public enterprise reform and trade liberalization data for each country from 1970 to 1999. We found that crisis hypothesis and honeymoon period hypothesis are strongly supported by the data. Quite interestingly, the data suggest that a democratic government is more likely to initiate economic reform. Also, we found that seeking for new financial sources to deal with budget deficit is an important motive for PE reform and that a favorable balance of payment position is an important prerequisite for the initiation of trade liberalization."
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign