Person:
Nguyen, Ha
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Financial Sector,
Private Sector Development,
Global Economy
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
July 5, 2023
Biography
Ha Minh Nguyen is an Economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth Team of the Development Research Group. He joined the Bank in July 2009 as a Young Economist after earning a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He also holds a M.A. and B.A. in economics from The University of Adelaide, Australia. His research interests include International Finance and Economic Growth. His current research is on the financial crisis and the real exchange rates.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 16
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Publication
Demand Collapse or Credit Crunch to Firms? Evidence from the World Bank's Financial Crisis Survey in Eastern Europe
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-10)While there is a consensus that the 2008-2009 crisis was triggered by financial market disruptions in the United States, there is little agreement on whether the transmission of the crisis and the subsequent prolonged recession are due to credit factors or to a collapse of demand for goods and services. This paper assesses whether the primary effect of the global crisis on Eastern European firms took the form of an adverse demand shock or a credit crunch. Using a unique firm survey conducted by the World Bank in six Eastern European countries during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the paper shows that the drop in demand for firms' products and services was overwhelmingly reported as the most damaging adverse effect of the crisis. Other "usual suspects," such as rising debt or reduced access to credit, are reported as minor. The paper also finds that the changes in firms' sales and installed capacity are significantly and robustly correlated with the demand sensitivity of the sector in which the firms operate. However, they are not robustly correlated with various proxies for firms' credit needs. -
Publication
Institutions and Firms' Return to Innovation : Evidence from the World Bank Enterprise Survey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)This paper poses a question: do firms in developing countries not innovate because they are unwilling to? The question moves away from the conventional focus on the obstacles (such as the lack of access to finance) that hinder firms' innovation ability. The World Bank's Enterprise Survey is used first to estimate the return to firms' innovation across many developing countries, in terms of sales and sales per worker. Then the return to innovation is compared across countries with different levels of institutional quality. In countries with lower institutional quality (specifically, rule of law, regulatory quality, property and patent right protection), the return to firms' innovation is lower. This suggests that poor institutional environment lowers firms' return to innovation and hence discourages them from investing in researching and adopting new products. -
Publication
Valuation Effects with Transitory and Trend Productivity Shocks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-01)In the past two decades, cross-border portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices of a country's external assets and liabilities (i.e. "valuation effects") in affecting the country's net foreign asset position. Valuation effects are commonly thought as stabilizing: they counteract current account movements and mitigate the impact of the current account on the country's net foreign asset position. This paper shows that whether valuation effects are stabilizing or not depends critically on the nature of underlying productivity shocks. In response to transitory shocks, valuation effects are stabilizing; but in response to trend shocks, such effects amplify the impact of the current account on the net foreign asset position. These contrasting results arise because optimally smoothing consumers respond differently to a transitory shock than to a trend shock to income. The results are consistent with the pattern of external imbalances between the United States and other G.7 countries since the 1990s. -
Publication
The Great Recession and Job Loss Spillovers: Impact of Tradable Employment Shocks on Supporting Services
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01)This paper explores the spillover effects of job losses via input-output linkages during the Great Recession. Exploiting exogenous variation in tradable employment shocks across U.S. counties, the paper finds that job losses in a county’s tradable sectors cause further job losses in the county’s supporting services. For a given county, a 10 percent exogenous decline in tradable employment reduces supporting industries’ employment by 3.8 percent. In addition, a county’s regional supporting services are relatively less affected by its tradable job losses than its local supporting services are, which reinforces the argument that the spillovers are due to input-output linkages. -
Publication
Unemployment and Mortality: Evidence from the Great Recession
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03)Did unemployment in the Great Recession hurt people's health? The broad answer is no: job losses have statistically insignificant impacts on mortality. The exogenous sources of job losses in a U.S. county is the tradable job losses driven by external demand collapses during the Great Recession. The insignificant relationship holds for males and females, for all age groups, and for almost all categories of mortality. Three important exceptions are Alzheimer's, poisoning, and homicide. -
Publication
Trading Together: Reviving Middle East and North Africa Regional Integration in the Post-COVID Era
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-10-19)The MENA Economic Update is a product of the World Bank's Office of the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa. This presents the short-term, macroeconomic outlook and economic challenges facing countries in the region. -
Publication
Correcting Real Exchange Rate Misalignment : Conceptual and Practical Issues
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)This paper studies the issue of real exchange rate misalignment and the difficulties in settling international real exchange rate disputes. The authors show theoretically that determining when a country should be sanctioned for real exchange rate "manipulations" is difficult: in some situations a country's real exchange rate targeting can be beneficial to other countries, while in others it is not. Regardless, it is difficult to establish whether a misaligned real exchange rate is intentionally manipulated rather than unintentionally caused by other policies or by various distortions in the economy. The paper continues by illustrating the difficulty in measuring real exchange rate misalignment, and provides a critical assessment of existing methodologies. It concludes by proposing a new method for measuring real exchange rate misalignment based on differences in marginal products between producers of tradable and non-tradable goods. -
Publication
Credit Constraints and the North-South Transmission of Crises
( 2010-08-01)Adverse shocks to rich countries often have a large and persistent negative impact on investment and output in developing countries. This paper examines a transmission mechanism that can account for this stylized fact. The mechanism is based on the existence of international financial frictions. Specifically, if a small, developing country has to collateralize its assets to borrow funds to invest, falling asset prices caused by a negative shock in an advanced economy worsen the developing country's collateral value and reduce its ability to borrow and reinvest. Hence, investment in the developing country declines, and international investors repatriate capital to the advanced country. As less capital now can be pledged as collateral, the developing country's credit constraint is further tightened, which leads to another round of decline in investment. This generates a downward spiral that may cause large output losses to the developing country. The mechanism finds empirical support in the 2008-2009 crisis data. -
Publication
Consumption Baskets and Currency Choice in International Borrowing
( 2011-11-01)Most emerging markets do not borrow much internationally in their own currency, although doing that has been argued as an attractive insurance mechanism. This phenomenon, commonly labeled "the original sin", has mostly been interpreted as evidence of the countries' inability to borrow in domestic currency from abroad. This paper provides a novel explanation for that phenomenon: not that countries are unable to borrow abroad in their currency, they might not need to do so. In the model, the small prevalence of external borrowing in domestic currency arises as an equilibrium outcome, despite the absence of exogenous frictions or limits on market participation. The equilibrium outcome is driven by the fact that domestic and foreign lenders have differential consumption baskets. In particular, a large part of domestic lenders' consumption basket is denominated in domestic currency whereas all of foreign lenders' is in dollars. A depreciation of domestic currency, which tends to occur in bad times, is therefore less harmful to domestic savers than to foreign investors. This makes domestic lenders require a lower premium than foreign lenders on domestic currency debt. For plausible calibrations, this consumption basket effect can induce foreign investors to pull out of the domestic currency debt market. -
Publication
Middle East and North Africa Economic Update, April 2019: Reforms and External Imbalances - The Labor-Productivity Connection in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-04)World Bank economists expect economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to continue at a modest pace of about 1.5 to 3.5 percent during 2019-2021, with some laggards and a few emerging growth stars. In late 2018, The World Bank called on the leaders of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to aim high. We called for a set of aspirational, but attainable, goals in the digital-economy space (Arezki and Belhaj 2018). If the economies of MENA achieve those goals, they will not only have leapfrogged many advanced economies in terms of coverage and quality of cellular and broadband services, they will register notable advancements in digital payments. This installment of the Middle East Economic Update series, published every six months by the MENA Office of the Chief Economist, makes a more subtle point about a slow moving emerging challenge for the region’s economies: reducing macroeconomic vulnerabilities in some economies is inextricably linked to an all-out effort to create an advanced digital economy (the so-called Digital Moonshot) and other structural reforms. The link, surprisingly, is aggregate labor productivity.