Middle East and Central Asia > Oman

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Pierpaolo Grippa
and
Lucyna Gornicka
Concentration risk is an important feature of many banking sectors, especially in emerging and small economies. Under the Basel Framework, Pillar 1 capital requirements for credit risk do not cover concentration risk, and those calculated under the Internal Ratings Based (IRB) approach explicitly exclude it. Banks are expected to compensate for this by autonomously estimating and setting aside appropriate capital buffers, which supervisors are required to assess and possibly challenge within the Pillar 2 process. Inadequate reflection of this risk can lead to insufficient capital levels even when the capital ratios seem high. We propose a flexible technique, based on a combination of “full” credit portfolio modeling and asymptotic results, to calculate capital requirements for name and sector concentration risk in banks’ portfolios. The proposed approach lends itself to be used in bilateral surveillance, as a potential area for technical assistance on banking supervision, and as a policy tool to gauge the degree of concentration risk in different banking systems.
Mr. Ananthakrishnan Prasad
and
Mr. Raphael A Espinoza
The GCC countries maintain a policy of open capital accounts and a pegged (or nearly-pegged) exchange rate, thereby reducing their freedom to run an independent monetary policy. This paper shows, however, that the pass-through of policy rates to retail rates is on the low side, reflecting the shallowness of money markets and the manner in which GCC central banks operate. In addition to policy rates, the GCC monetary authorities use reserve requirements, loan-to-deposit ratios, and other macroprudential tools to affect liquidity and credit. Nonetheless, a panel vector auto regression model suggests that U.S. monetary policy has a strong and statistically significant impact on broad money, non-oil activity, and inflation in the GCC region. Unanticipated shocks to broad money also affect prices but do not stimulate growth. Continued efforts to develop the domestic financial markets will increase interest rate pass-through and strengthen monetary policy transmission.
Abdullah Al-Hassan
This paper constructs a coincident indicator for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area business cycle. The resulting coincident indicator provides a reliable measure of the GCC business cycle; over the last decade, the GCC coincident index and the real GDP growth have moved closely together. Since the indicator is constructed using a small number of common factors, the strong correlation between the indicator and real GDP growth points to a high degree of commonality across GCC economies. The timing and direction of movements in macroeconomic variables are characterized with respect to the coincident indicator. Finally, to obtain a meaningful economic interpretation of the latent factors, their behavior is compared to the observed economic variables.