The Initial Impact of the Crisis on Emerging Market Countries

To understand the diverse impact of the crisis across emerging market countries, we explore the role of two shocks—the collapse in trade and the sharp decline in financial flows—in the transmission of the crisis from the advanced economies. We first develop a simple open economy model, which allows for imperfect capital mobility and potentially contractionary effects of currency depreciation due to foreign debt exposure. We then look at the cross-country evidence. The data suggest a strong role for both trade and financial shocks. Perhaps surprisingly, the data give little econometric support for a central role of either reserves or exchange rate regimes. We end by presenting case studies for Latvia, Russia, and Chile.