Search Results

This chapter offers a brief prospectus for a progressive geopolitics that can challenge both the ideals and the account of reality offered by conservative geopolitics. It begins with the ideas of Kropótkin, Kingsley, Hobson, and Reclus, but rejects any notion of a single civilizational scale. It argues instead for a progressive geopolitics defined by an understanding of global interdependencies, the obligations of human solidarity, and the claims of international human rights.

The world economies are tightly interlinked, via a complex net of transmission channels, which are however hard to model empirically. The GVAR, a VAR based model of the global economy, offers a solution to the so called "curse of dimensionality", i.e. the existence of too many parameters to be estimated with respect to the available observations. This volume presents - for a first time in a compact and rather easy to read format - principles and structure of the basic GVAR model and a number of its many applications and extensions developed in the last few years by a growing literature. Its main objective is to show how powerful the model can be as a tool for forecasting and scenario analysis. The clear modelling structure of the GVAR appeals to policy makers and practitioners as shown by its growing use among major institutions, as well as by econometricians, as shown by the main extensions and applications

This chapter provides a brief overview of the GVAR modelling framework and presents the basic GVAR model of Dees, di Mauro, Pesaran, and Smith (2007, DdPS). The DdPS GVAR model is estimated for 26 countries/regions (the euro area being treated as a single economy) covering the period 1979 to 2011, thus extending the original estimation sample of DdPS by eight years. The emphasis is on the short-term and long-term implications of external shocks for a set of focus economies, namely USA, Euro area, China, Japan, UK, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway. The results among other suggest that financial shocks are transmitted relatively rapidly, and often get amplified as they travel from the USA to the rest of the world.

The performance of the world’s economies are closely tied through trade and international capital markets and it is widely recognised that business cycle fluctuations in one country are quickly transmitted to others. However, there is no clear consensus on how to characterise global recessions or investigate the extent to which these are driven by the interdependencies in output determination across countries. This paper explores different facets of the recessionary experiences of 2008-11 using a GVAR representation of the actual and expected output series in the G7 economies. The nature of the interdependence of the G7 countries’ economic performance is investigated and recession is considered by calculating the likelihood of a range of recessionary events defined at the national and G7-wide levels.

Some of the main findings of the book include: Cross-border financial spill-overs are particularly important, not only during the 2007-09 crises but more generally, in transmitting financial and real shocks across the different regions. US credit supply shocks are found to have strong effects on a range of real and financial variables not only in the US, but also in many other economies. GVAR forecasts are found to perform better than a number of benchmarks, especially for output, inflation and real equity prices. The GVAR approach is particularly relevant in stress-testing exercises. The GVAR approach can be readily adapted to allow for non-linear dynamics. The GVAR model it has proved useful to quantify the effects of China’s emergence in the world economy. The GVAR can provide valuable insights into shock transmission across regions within a given economy with important lessons for regional policy.

Quarterly Euro-area GDP data are published at a lag of about 45 days. This hinders policymaking in real-time. Accordingly, this chapter evaluates the quality of GDP nowcasts produced at a shorter lag by exploiting available monthly indicator variables. Given that Euro-area GDP is the aggregation of national GDP data, and since publication lags vary both by country and by indicator variable, we extend previous work by accommodating both cross-country and cross-variable dependencies when nowcasting. This is achieved using a Global Vector-Autoregressive (GVAR) model. The GVAR, by efficiently conditioning on all available disaggregate information, delivers Root Mean Squared Error minimising errors. Nowcasts for the Euro-area are produced within-quarter, reflecting the differing publication lags and informational content of GDP, industrial production and qualitative survey data across the Euro-area countries. Using a novel real-time dataset for the Euro-area, and its constituent countries, in real-time simulations we find that the proposed GVAR nowcasts are more competitive than the commonly used ‘direct’ approach to nowcasting an aggregate. But parameter estimation error means that, in practice, the GVAR’s nowcasts are less accurate than those from the ‘indirect’ approach, which itself is a restricted GVAR. This motivates forecast combination as a means of rendering GVAR nowcasts more robust to ‘structural instabilities

Many of our day to day interactions are with ‘strangers’. Indeed for some isolated older people, interactions with strangers comprise the majority of their human contact. The conversations they have on buses, in shops, in the park may be the only conversation they have in a day. The way they are treated at the doctors surgery or when they pay a bill at the bank can make an important impact on their well-being. The concept of ‘respect’ has been invoked in the context of policies intended to counteract the perceived incivility of public behaviour – particularly amongst young people. A related concept – ‘recognition’, has been advanced as necessary to a full understanding of social justice. At both individual and collective level people need to experience positive recognition to feel that they are being properly and justly treated. This chapter considers a way of understanding the significance of stranger relationships through care ethics. As well as apparently casual face to face interactions with strangers, the chapter also discusses treatment of refugees and those with mental illness. It also reflects on interactions with unknown others through ICT in order to consider to relevance of care to distant as well as intimate relationships.