Volume 7 (2018): Edizione 1 (January 2018)

In recent two decades, due to contributions of political macroeconomics, the focus of macroeconomics turned away from a narrow perspective based on market and privatisation (market fundamentalism) towards a broader perspective based on institutions and values (institutionalism). Within the institutional paradigm, the emphasis nowadays is put on inclusive institutions. The main thesis of one of leading proponents of political macroeconomics, D. Acemoglu, is: “growth is much more likely under inclusive (economic and political) institutions than extractive institutions.” Good institutions are characterized by three attributes: 1) they establish and protect property rights; 2) they restrict social elites which strive to expropriate income and property of others members of society; 3) they provide equal chances for employment, social security and civil rights to all individuals. Good institutions contribute to political stability, successful macroeconomic policy, and enhance initiatives. The key role of institutions is to secure stability and continuity. Extractive institutions can negatively affect entrepreneurship and entire economic development in two ways: a) by increasing the opportunity cost, resulting in upward movement of the opportunity cost curve; and b) by affecting return to entrepreneurship resulting in leftward movement of the return to entrepreneurship curve. Apart from independence and accountability of institutions what is needed is sufficient level of inclusion. Inclusion should encompass three dimensions: personal, financial, and political. The introduction of principles of independence, accountability, and inclusion is essential for emergence and performance of all institutions.

Insurance companies are facing major challenges that point to the need for control process and risk management. Risk management in insurance has a direct impact on solvency, economic security, and overall financial stability of insurance companies. It is very important for insurance companies to adequately calculate risks to which they are exposed. Asset liability management (ALM), as an integrated approach to financial management, requires simultaneous decision-making about categories and values of assets and liabilities in order to establish the optimum volume and the ratio of assets and liabilities, with the understanding of complexity of the financial market in which financial institutions operate. ALM focuses on a significant number of risks, whereby the emphasis in this paper will be on interest rate risk which indicates potential losses that may reflect in a lower interest margin, a lower value of assets or both, in terms of changes in interest rates. In the above context, the aim of this paper is to show how to protect from interest rate changes and how these changes influence the insurance market in Montenegro, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view. The authors consider this to be an interesting and very important topic, especially because the life insurance market in Montenegro is underdeveloped and subject to fluctuations. Also, taking into account the fact that Montenegro is a country that has been making serious efforts to join the EU, it is expected that insurance companies in Montenegro will strengthen their financial position in the market even using the ALM traditional techniques, which is shown in this paper.

We examine the reasons why the SNB gave up the lower floor of the 1.20 CHF/EUR exchange rate arrangement. Three types of shocks played a role: Exogenous shocks to the autonomous component of money demand, interest rate decreases of the ECB, as well as appreciation expectations. In order to defend these shocks, the SNB intervened heavily in the foreign exchange market. This led to an accumulation of reserves in the central bank’s balance sheet of the size of 80% of Swiss GDP. Interestingly, the SNB did not lower the interest rate into the negative range during the time period where the peg was in place. Hence, the SNB did not do ”whatever it takes” to defend the peg.

After the 2008 crisis, despite economic recovery that started in 2009, the world economy has experienced a downward shift of its growth path and a consequent decline. As shown at the beginning of this paper, this shift and growth rate stagnation are totally attributable to the economic dynamics in developed economies, the USA and the EU. Explanations of this phenomenon can be divided into two large groups: explanations that belong to the demand side and those that belong to the supply side. The aim of this paper is to give a critical survey of the most important explanations for the ongoing growth stagnation in developed countries and consequently in the entire world economy. This ongoing prolonged stagnation can only be explained by looking at both, the demand and supply sides of the explanation, and particularly by taking a closer look at the interaction between aggregate demand and aggregate supply. In other words, secular stagnation manifests itself as a problem of the limitation of long run growth of aggregate demand. However, in order to explain the causes of those demand limitations, we have to undertake a careful analysis of the supply side dynamics, especially the dynamics of innovations, which bring us to circular and cumulative causation. In order to explain the numerous consequences of this stagnation and to solve some important puzzles, like the productivity paradox for example, a special emphasis is given to the analysis of deindustrialization and the consequent strange reoccurrence of a dual economy within most developed countries during the period of the IT revolution and hyper-globalization. It will also be shown that this new dual economy presents serious limitations for further technological advancement and economic development, quite contrary to the old dualism which contributed to an acceleration of economic growth.

This study investigates the impact of financial development on investment in South Africa between 1976 and 2014. The model estimated is based on the flexible accelerator investment model. Composite indices for bank-based and market-based financial development indicators are used as explanatory variables. The estimated model postulates that both bank-based financial development and market-based financial development have an acceleratorenhancing effect on investment. Results show that market-based financial development has a positive impact on investment in the long run, while bank-based financial development has a negative effect in the short run. Implications are that, for South Africa, market-based financial development has a positive accelerator-enhancing effect on investment in the long run. In contrast, bank-based financial development is found to have a negative accelerator enhancing effect on investment in the short run.

In order to enhance the understanding of credit cycle dynamics in Croatia, we explore the evolution of credit demand and credit supply of corporates and households in Croatia and identify their determinants based on the switching regression framework. These results are crosschecked by the insights from the bank lending survey. The conducted analysis shows there are both supply and demand-side factors that limit the possibility of intensifying household and corporate credit activity. However, a more pronounced drag seems to be coming from subdued demand, which is greatly influenced by the unfavourable domestic macroeconomic environment and, particularly, GDP developments. This suggests that it is not unusual that credit recovery is still missing but also confirms that the scope for monetary policy to stimulate lending is limited.

We present a new-Keynesian model for small open economy, with price rigidities stemming from a Calvo pricing scheme (1983), monopolistic banking system, financial dollarization of the economy and monetary and fiscal policy governed by rules. We estimate the model on Serbian data and propose various model extensions that could be used for monetary and fiscal policy analysis. We consider 6 combinations of monetary and fiscal policy regimes, inflation targeting and currency peg on one hand, and discretionary cyclically neutral fiscal policy and fiscal rules, on the other. The model with inflation targeting and discretionary fiscal policy fits the data best.

In consideration of channels through which monetary policy affects economic activity, the monetary aggregates have been mostly ignored by the monetary authorities instead of which shortrun interest rates have been given a priori role. These monetary aggregates are largely argued to fail in measuring the effectiveness of different monetary policy regimes in forecasting the macroeconomic fundamentals. Grounded on the “Barnett critique”, the formation of traditional simple-sum monetary aggregates assuming for perfect substitution among the components of the money supply is blamed for such a failure of money in explaining the real activity. Given increasing varieties of financial assets which have completely different “moneyness”, it is important to provide an alternative measure of the money supply. Hereby, the Divisia monetary aggregates which give different weights to different assets have arisen as an alternative approach. In this study, a Divisia index is constructed to test its predictive power on quantities and prices compared to its simple sum counterpart. Accordingly, a Divisia index is built-up for Turkish economy for the period 2006-2016 to see whether the utilization of the Divisia monetary aggregates in the conduct of monetary policy makes any difference compared to that of traditional simple sum money supply. Under different specifications, though the relative power of the Divisia aggregates in predicting quantity and price variables is found, still, it can be argued that theoretically well-rounded formation of the Divisia index is not that much empirically justified for the case of Turkey.

Satisfaction in life and everyday work is important in everyone’s life. We spend most of our time working or being involved in some economic activity to make a living. This paper focuses on the relative importance of job satisfaction factors and their impact on the overall job satisfaction of employees. The present study is a cross-sectional type of research performed in 2015. The study population is senior executives of the Asgariyeh and MehrIran Banks in Qazvin and Alborz. The research instruments included two questionnaires based on individual characteristics and proprietary. The Individual characteristics questionnaire consists of 4 questions and the Proprietary questionnaire consists of 70 items, including a dependent variable of Job satisfaction. SPSS software was used for data analysis. One-sample t-Test was used to investigate the condition of each of the dependent and independent variables in the research. In conclusion, it can be said that the colleagues, upgrade, and compensation variables are respectively in the first, second, and third place influencing job satisfaction.