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NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE FISCAL STIMULUS OF 2009-10: TRADE OPENNESS, FISCAL SPACE AND EXCHANGE RATE ADJUSTMENT Joshua Aizenman Yothin Jinjarak Working Paper 17427 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17427 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 September 2011 Prepared for the NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics, June 2011, Malta. We are grateful to the insightful comments of the discussants, Menzie Chinn and Francesco Giavazzi, and from Jeff Frankel, Jorge Braga de Macedo, Assaf Razin, Andy Rose and the conference participants. All errors are ours. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2011 by Joshua Aizenman and Yothin Jinjarak. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Fiscal Stimulus of 2009-10: Trade Openness, Fiscal Space and Exchange Rate Adjustment Joshua Aizenman and Yothin Jinjarak NBER Working Paper No. 17427 September 2011 JEL No. E62,F42,O23 ABSTRACT This paper studies the cross-country variation of the fiscal stimulus and the exchange rate adjustment propagated by the global crisis of 2008-9, identifying the role of economic structure in accounting for the heterogeneity of response. We find that greater de facto fiscal space prior to the global crisis and lower trade openness were associated with a higher fiscal stimulus/GDP during 2009-2010 (where the de facto fiscal space is the inverse of the average tax-years it would take to repay the public debt). Lowering the 2006 public debt/average tax base from the level of low-income countries (5.94) down to the average level of the Euro minus the Euro-area peripheral countries (1.97), was associated with a larger crisis stimulus in 2009-11 of 2.78 GDP percentage points. Joint estimation of fiscal stimuli and exchange rate depreciations indicates that higher trade openness was associated with a smaller fiscal stimulus and a higher depreciation rate during the crisis. Overall, the results are in line with the predictions of the neo-Keynesian open-economy model. Joshua Aizenman Department of Economics; E2 1156 High St. University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 and NBER [email protected] Yothin Jinjarak University of London College Buildings, 534 London UK, WC1H 0XG [email protected]