DOI: 10.32609/j.ruje.12.118859

Authors: Angelina E. Shpilevaya, Mikhail Y. Gareev, Kristina V. Nesterova, Andrey V. Polbin

Abstract: This paper presents a dynamic overlapping generations general equilibrium model for the Russian economy to assess the economic and fiscal effects of the 2018 pension reform, which raised the statutory retirement age. The model incorporates realistic demographic projections, variable labor supply responses, and exogenous scenarios for oil prices. It evaluates the impact of the reform across a range of future demographic and external conditions by comparing post-reform trajectories of macroeconomic aggregates, public deficits, and tax rates with baseline scenarios without reform. The results show that raising the retirement age moderately reduces consumption in the short run but leads to more robust growth in output, investment, government spending, and exports in the long term. Pension reform improves fiscal sustainability by lowering the required budget-balancing VAT rate and pension fund deficit, especially under adverse demographic conditions or low oil prices. The fiscal effect of reform is muted in optimistic demographic scenarios with strong labor force growth, but remains significant when population aging intensifies fiscal pressure. These findings highlight the importance of structural reforms for long-term macroeconomic stability and underscore the critical role of demographics and external shocks in shaping pension system performance.

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DOI: 10.32609/j.ruje.11.146303

Authors: Heba Helmy

Abstract: We aim to show how any variants of a unified currency among BRICS Plus countries are challengeable, by probing the disparate influence of the positive and negative alterations in the crude oil’s international price on the real effective exchange rates. The paper applies the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag approach to separate oil price upswings from downswings and assesses how such changes asymmetrically affect the real effective exchange rates of BRICS Plus members in the short and long runs using monthly time series variables from January 2000 until July 2023. Our findings reveal that in the short run, the asymmetric impacts of the positive and negative oil price changes on the real effective exchange rates appear in all BRICS Plus countries. In the long run, Brazil and Argentina confirmed the asymmetric impact of oil price changes on their real effective exchange rates, while the symmetric impact is confirmed in Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Ethiopia. Our findings prove that a unified currency or a unified monetary union is a very challenging idea, as continuous appreciations or depreciations of the local currencies of BRICS Plus countries will have to be implemented to preserve their alignment with the composite currency unit. Moreover, the asymmetric responses will induce diverse policy recommendations concerning the oil pricing. Our study comes to fill a vital lacuna in the literature as it is the first study to probe the asymmetric association between the oil’s international price and the real effective exchange rate in the BRICS Plus countries.

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DOI: 10.32609/j.ruje.8.89717

Authors: Shweta Sikhwal

Abstract: We examine, using a monthly dataset from 2007 to 2020, the US interest rate shocks’ effects on exchange rates, broad money aggregates, and foreign exchange reserves in emerging market economies (EMEs) post global financial crisis. To evaluate the impact of unconventional monetary policy initiatives, we employ Wu-Xia’s shadow interest rates. There are two parts to the methodology. The first part focuses on the identification of the unanticipated US interest rate shock in a SVAR model. In the second part, we incorporate the US interest rate shock into the panel structural VAR to analyze its impact on 29 countries from various regions. A positive shock to US interest rates depreciates the exchange rate of EMEs against the US dollar. According to our findings, it results in a decline in the broad money aggregate and foreign exchange reserves. The findings are consistent across multiple EME regions.

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DOI: 10.1016/j.ruje.2015.12.004

Authors: Georgy Idrisov, Maria Kazakova, Andrey Polbin

Abstract: This article analyzes the impact of global oil prices on Russia's economic growth and its growth rate in terms of output. It also reviews the mechanics of the long-term and short-term impacts on output resulting from changes in oil prices. The authors argue that the effect of oil prices on output has decreased dramatically under current economic conditions ever since the period of recovery growth in the early 2000s. The main conclusion of the paper is that, on the basis of classical models, a constant increase in oil prices cannot influence the long-term economic growth rate and only predetermines short-term transitional trends from one long-term equilibrium to another.

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