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One of the traditions of the Central Bank economy departments is that they occasionally leave monetary policy and allow their employees to write some freedom to write the research they really care about.
After all, they want to recruit high doctorates while offering lower salaries than the private sector, and Kudos less professional than the Academy. So the “paper paper” series are used to give economists a small treatment from time to time.
The latest beneficiary of these conditions of the educated school is Alexander Popov of the European Central Bank, who has published a work work directly addressing an essential question of structural macroeconomics – what are the promoters of aggregate exports?
Apparently the answer is “Pope visits”.
The hypothesis is that a visit from Pontifi – specifically, a visit by Pope John Paul II, who visited 129 countries between 1979 and 2004, many for the first time – puts a “map” place in terms of Catholics in the world. As a result, trade partners with a large Catholic population increase the amount of business they do with the lucky clay.
The effect is stronger for countries that are “in lower stages of economic development”, with relatively poor connections of global trading and which do not have large Catholic populations themselves.
Thus, for example, a visit by the Holy Father for Yemen, and is undoubtedly currently unlikely for a variety of reasons, it would potentially have a significant effect on the amount of molluscs (the country’s main export after gold and scrap iron) selling to Italy or Ireland.
Alternative hypotheses were considered! In particular, trade growth appears to be widely based on both consumer goods and capital goods, as well as services; It is not just a short -term increase in sales of papal souvenirs and pilgrimage tourism.
Moreover, the “textual analysis” of speeches reveals that the Pope is not actively supporting exports and is increasing the economy – the word “trade” was used only 23 times by him and “globalization” four, compared to the most popular topics such as “unity”, “life and love” or “church and faith”.
But more interesting, it seems to be only the Holy Father who has this kind of juice.
Queen Elizabeth II also made many foreign visits in the same period, including 35 countries that had never had a British monarch before, and among them Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush SR, Clinton and Bush Jr. gathered the first 91 visits, almost as Pope. There were also five summer Olympics and five world cups. All of them created plenty of publicity, but none of them had a statistically significant effect on exports, let alone the type of impact associated with a first visit by Pope John Paul II.
Of course there are important ways for future research here. For example, the tables appear to be somewhat less after 1990. Why?
Was this due to the fall of communism in Europe, or was there any current decline in JP2 powers? Is there any optimal planning algorithm for papal visits? How is this compared to the influence of Taylor Swift? Hopefully the ECB will be able to tell us.
