MACRO: Policy responses to Covid-19
Below is our weekly summary table on the health and economic policies that selected governments around the world are implementing to counter the fallout from Covid-19. The updated table includes information about each country’s vaccination strategy. Please do not hesitate to cont… Become a member to read the rest of this article Username or […]
PHILIPPINES: The symbolic marker to the end of Duterte’s China pivot
The Philippine government announced during the visit of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on 30 July that Manila was retracting its February 2020 termination of the 1999 Philippines-USA visiting forces agreement (VFA). During a press conference yesterday, 2 August, Duterte explai… Become a member to read the rest of this article
EUROPE: CEE PULSE
Relatively low immunization rates and gradually rising Covid-19 infections in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) raise concerns about the new wave of the pandemic. This week, Bulgarian parliament will vote on the government of Prime Minister-designate Plamen Nikolov, nominated by t… Become a member to read the rest of this article
Leveraging IWOSS and soft skills to address slow structural transformation and youth unemployment in Uganda
In recent years, Uganda’s economic growth has been among sub-Saharan Africa’s strongest, averaging 5.4 percent between 2010 and 2019 (World Bank, 2020). However, the rate of growth has failed to match the rate at which employment opportunities are created to both absorb the burgeoning labor force and improve livelihoods. The high population growth rate (recorded at 3.1 percent per year) has resulted in a high labor-force growth rate that has outpaced the rate of job creation, resulting in increasing unemployment and pervasive underemployment rates.
Moreover, in this tough labor market, young and female workers remain disadvantaged, and overall employment numbers often mask other problems in the labor market. For example, as we find in our recent working paper, while the number of unemployed actually declined between 2012/13 and 2016/17 for both young female Ugandans (23.1 percent vs. 18.5 percent) and young male Ugandans (18.5 percent vs. 9.6 percent), the annualized growth rate of discouraged workers—potential workers who would like to work but are unable to secure a job and so have given up on the process—is extremely high and more acute among Uganda’s youth.
A solution?
Like in many other African countries, the slow growth of Uganda’s manufacturing sector—a sector that historically has led to the absorption of low-skilled workers and structural transformation in much of the developing world—has constrained labor outcomes in the country. To address this issue, recent research points to other sectors—termed “industries without smokestacks” (IWOSS)—that share much in common with manufacturing, especially their tradability and tendency to absorb large numbers of low-skilled workers. Examples of IWOSS include agro-industry, horticulture, tourism, business services, transit trade, and some information and communication technology (ICT)-based services. To better assess the potential of these sectors to drive structural transformation, we recently published a case study examining the constraints to growth of select IWOSS sectors (horticulture, agro-processing, and tourism) and skills requirements for those sectors.
IWOSS sectors’ growth contributing to employment growth
IWOSS are well-positioned to help Uganda achieve its growth objectives: Indeed, while the contribution of IWOSS to GDP in recent years has been less than non-IWOSS sectors, it has been higher than manufacturing (Table 1). Moreover, growth in IWOSS sectors (22.9 percent) has been higher than either manufacturing (17.2 percent) or non-IWOSS (18.4), implying that the contribution of IWOSS to GDP is increasing.
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In terms of employment, IWOSS sectors show higher elasticities than non-IWOSS and manufacturing: A 1 percentage point increase in GDP in an average IWOSS sector is associated with a 0.96 percent increase in employment. For manufacturing, the employment elasticity is negative and sizable, which could suggest that automation in the sector is replacing workers, having the opposite historic effect of industry. Despite agriculture being the biggest employer, it has a very low employment elasticity.
Table 1. Change in GDP and employment from 2012/13 to 2016/17 by sector
Source: Authors own calculations’ using UBOS Statistical Abstracts and Survey data sets.Note: This is Table 5 in the case study.
What sectors are driving structural transformation?
As seen in Figure 1, which combines GDP/output and employment growth to get a full picture of industry changes over time, by and large, little structural transformation has taken place over the time period under consideration. While growth in IWOSS overall has contributed to employment growth, the subsector “finance, business, and professional services” seems to have significantly driven the structural growth agenda in the country—much like in South Africa. While tourism, horticulture and export crops and agro-processing—the three IWOSS sectors we explore in this paper due to their significant contributions to revenue, potential for absorbing many Ugandan laborers, and strong backward and forward linkages–do provide great contributions to GDP and employment, they also have had mixed impacts on the economy’s structural growth. For example, while agro-processing seems to have spurred transformation, this change seems to have been driven by its contribution to GDP, not necessarily as an employment avenue.
Figure 1. Correlation between sectoral productivity and change in employment in Uganda, 2016/17
Notes: Uses methodology in McMillan and Rodrik (2011); yellow indicates IWOSS sectors; purple indicates manufacturing; and light blue indicates other non-IWOSS sectors.Source: Authors’ own illustration using 2016/17 UNHS dataset.
What does the future hold for growth and employment in IWOSS sectors?
The outlook for the Ugandan economy over the next 10 years suggests its makeup will shift, leading to a concentration of employment in tourism, finance and business services, ICT, and agro-processing. In our recent paper, we use a 7 percent GDP growth scenario (Table 2) to examine the prospects for job creation in the country. We find that IWOSS sectors will expand somewhat faster (8 percent) than non-IWOSS (6 percent) and twice as fast as manufacturing (4 percent) by 2029/30. In the same vein, employment is expected to grow at about 4.5 percent, largely driven by employment growth in the IWOSS sectors (6.3 percent).
Table 2. Sectoral distribution of GDP and employment in 2029/30—an illustrative 7%-growth scenario
Source: Extracted from Table 20 in the case study.
But are young people ready for these jobs?
While in other countries, IWOSS looks to readily absorb low-skilled workers, our research finds the trend in Uganda to be more nuanced. In fact, in line with the projected strong growth in IWOSS sectors, we find that the skill profile of workers in IWOSS will shift distinctively toward skilled and high-skilled workers, which could be problematic since we predict that, by 2029/30, 54 percent of Ugandan workers in IWOSS will need to be skilled or high-skilled. For a detailed discussion at the sector-specific level, see Table 21 in the full case study).
Figure 2. Uganda’s 7%-growth scenario—Projected employment by skill level
Note: MFG = manufacturing; non-IWOSS excludes manufacturing.Source: Derived from Table 21 in the Uganda case study.
Requisite skills needed for new jobs in horticulture, agro-processing, and tourism
To better advise Uganda on how it can prepare its young people to enter a labor market in which IWOSS are expanding, we need to assess which skills are both available in and needed for the market. To do so, we conducted firm surveys and found, among other trends, that gaps in problem-solving skills among employees inhibit firms from meeting their full potential. More specifically we found that tourism firms place a heavy emphasis on problem-solving and basic skills; horticulture, on problem-solving and social skills; and agro-processing on basic skills, At the same time, the surveys revealed that while the youth were overskilled for the jobs they were holding, the majority had skills gaps in problem-solving in all three IWOSS sectors of focus. Figure 3 illustrates this trend for the tourism sector (see details in full case study).
Figure 3. Skills gap by occupation type in the tourism sector—hotels
Source: Authors’ own calculations based on field survey data (2020).
Importantly, beyond these needs, we also find that digital skills will be paramount for future occupations likely to hire the youth. Indeed, future digital-skills needs were identified as a must by the interviewed firms in the tourism sector. In horticulture, digital skills will be needed for the use of computerized mechanisms in the production of fresh fruits and vegetables while in agro-processing, as automation progresses, digital skills will be needed for the production of primary raw materials.
Constraints to aspired growth
In addition, as our paper points out, to leverage IWOSS sectors and soft skills as avenues for addressing Uganda’s current slow structural transformation and youth unemployment challenges, several constraints to the growth of these sectors must be addressed. Outstanding among these obstacles are: limited access to finance; poor and costly infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, internet, and phone coverage); inherent nontariff barriers; government bureaucracy; and skill gaps (noted briefly above).
Unfortunately, the emergence of COVID-19 has only exacerbated challenges facing IWOSS sectors and the economy in general (see our paper updating our original case study as Uganda now faces the COVID-19 pandemic). Indeed, the three IWOSS subsectors on which we focused experienced significant losses due to reduction of earnings as business operations declined owing to the pandemic-induced lockdown across both the country and the globe. Indeed, many firms responded by laying off some workers, both temporarily and permanently.
Recommendations
In the original case study, we offered a number of high-level policy recommendations that, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, remain extremely relevant for Uganda’s growth and job-creation potential. If anything, the pandemic has made our recommendations all the more urgent. These include, among others:
Develop avenues to improve the soft and digital skills of workers and reduce the cost of trading through investing in physical and digital infrastructure. Such a push could eradicate the skills mismatch reported by employers as one of the obstacles to their operations. We continue to see the importance of this recommendation now: When facing COVID-19, sectors and firms that adopted ICT/digital technologies continued to survive within the measures that the government took to control the spread of COVID-19.
Ensure increased access to affordable financing. Already, a step has been taken in this direction by recapitalizing the Uganda Development Bank (UDB), the Uganda Development Corporation (UDC), and the Micro Finance Support Centre (MFSC) in order to offer affordable credit and facilitate the COVID-19 economic recovery. Such a program is an opportunity for agro-processing firms to acquire long-awaited financing, which historically has been one of their most difficult operating constraints.
For a deeper dive into our research as well as sector-specific recommendations, see our working paper, “Industries without smokestacks in Africa: A Uganda case study.”
The impact of COVID-19 on industries without smokestacks in Uganda
Abstract
In Uganda, the spread of COVID-19 and its economic impacts gained momentum in March 2020 when the country’s first case was reported. By March 30, the government of Uganda had declared a nationwide lockdown in addition to other critical measures to minimize its spread.
The impacts of the virus itself together with government initiatives to control its spread have been felt in the political, social, and economic spheres of life of the country. Simply put, there have been losers and winners as the pandemic took its toll on the economy.
This brief examines the potential economic impact of COVID-19 on Uganda’s industries without smokestacks as a follow-up on the previous work undertaken in the same sectors prior to the pandemic. The aim is to ascertain whether the recommendations made prior to the pandemic are still relevant.
Download the working paper
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Employment creation potential, labor skills requirements, and skill gaps for young people: A Uganda case study
Introduction
Over the course of the last decade, Uganda’s economic growth has ranked among sub-Saharan Africa’s strongest; indeed, the country’s annualized average growth rate was 5.4 percent between 2010 and 2019 (World Bank, 2020). Despite this impressive growth, there has been limited creation of productive and decent jobs1 to both absorb the burgeoning labor force and improve livelihoods. The population growth rate (recorded at 3.1 percent per year) has consistently remained higher than the jobs creation rate necessary for absorbing persons joining the labor market, resulting in increasing unemployment and pervasive underemployment rates. Moreover, where jobs have been created, few young Ugandans (especially young women) have benefited from such opportunities. Indeed, a study conducted by the EPRC (2018) finds that, while the economy grew by 4.5 percent in 2016/17, this growth was largely driven by the services sector,2 but services, in turn, contribute a mere 15 percent to total employment. In addition, due to severe skill gaps, Ugandan youth are largely engaged in low-value services (e.g., petty trade, food vending, etc.), and only few are able to secure employment in high value-added economic activities like agro-processing, horticulture, or tourism.
Uganda’s economy-wide unemployment rate declined to 9.2 percent in 2016/17 from 11.1 percent in 2012/13. Among youth3 (who represent 21.6 percent of Uganda’s population), unemployment declined to 16.8 percent in 2016/17 from 20.3 percent in 2012/13, however, with less progress recorded for female youth. Underemployment, a critical development challenge faced by the youth, is widespread in Uganda and can partly be explained by low skills among job seekers (at 1 percent), time (at 43.6 percent) as well as wage-related aspects (at 30.2 percent) (UBOS 2018). At the same time, inequality of opportunity is also growing. Even among the employed youth, 21 percent are classified as poor due to the precarious jobs in which they are engaged, especially if they work in the informal sector.
In this regard, informality, underemployment, and unemployment persist in the country’s labor market; as a result, many Ugandans are engaged in “vulnerable employment.”4 Vulnerable employment is often characterized by inadequate earnings, low productivity, and difficult conditions of work that undermine workers’ fundamental rights. According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (2018), 61 percent of employed persons in the country were classified as engaged in vulnerable employment with the share being higher for female Ugandans (71 percent). Similarly, 68 percent of employed persons living in Uganda’s rural areas are more likely to engage in vulnerable employment compared to 48 percent living in the country’s urban areas.
While agriculture employs nearly 77 percent of the rural population, recorded growth in the sector was low at 2.8 percent in 2016/17 (UBOS 2018). However, sectors providing more productive and better-paying jobs, like agro-processing and high value-added agro-industry have clear linkages to agriculture sector’s overall performance in the country. Weak economic growth in agriculture, therefore, affects agro-industrialization, which, in turn, has implications for the employment viability in the dominant agro-industry. Sector-level performance is also deterred by irregularities and erratic decisions in the business and policy environment. Consequently, the vast majority of Uganda’s labor force remains employed in labor intensive and less productive sectors. Even within agriculture, only a very small proportion of agricultural workers are engaged in the cultivation of high-value, commercialized crops.
The above narrative is also exacerbated by the small and not expanding number of formal jobs, especially in Uganda’s public sector. This lack of available “white collar jobs” is met by a significant number of youth graduating annually either with a certificate, diploma, or degree who aspire to find such employment. While the private sector is coming in to fill the gap in creating jobs for this segment of the population, current efforts are not sufficient, and more opportunities for jobs to be created for this segment of the labor force need to be identified and supported.
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In order to create jobs, especially for the youth, there is need to raise private investment in labor-intensive industries. Besides providing jobs, labor-intensive industries—historically manufacturing— can pave the way for continuous upgrading to higher value-added economic activities. However, the average share of manufacturing in Uganda’s GDP keeps declining, from 11 percent between 2000 and 2010 to 9 percent between 2011 and 2018. Therefore, manufacturing will not be able to absorb the 600,000 young Ugandans entering the jobs market each year (AfDB, 2019).
In light of the slow growth of the manufacturing sector, Uganda needs to find alternatives for the creation of productive jobs if the country is to achieve its Vision 2040. Service-oriented industries that share key firm characteristics with manufacturing firms have the potential to enhance growth and create decent employment opportunities. Such industries are called “industries without smokestacks” (IWOSS). Newfarmer et al. (2018) classify these as agro-industry, horticulture, tourism, business services, transit trade, and some information and communication technology (ICT) based services. This study contributes to the evidence base around this topic by analyzing the role of IWOSS in generating large-scale employment opportunities for (young) workers in Uganda, especially in the formal parts of the economy. The paper pays particular attention to three sectors: agro-processing, horticulture, and tourism, as the earlier literature indicates that these sectors have considerable potential to create large-scale formal employment opportunities for young people.5
Specifically, this study:
Assesses the current employment creation potential along the value chains of IWOSS industries under their respective current sectoral growth trajectories;
Aims to identify the key constraints to growth in IWOSS sectors;
Estimates future labor demand in IWOSS sectors when identified constraints are removed;
Analyzes the occupation and labor skills requirements and gaps in IWOSS sectors; and
Pays particular attention to the need for soft and digital skills among youth (employed and unemployed) to ensure that suggested policy interventions can bridge them.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the approaches adopted as well as data sources and their limitations. Section 3 presents the country context and background with emphasis on the performance of selected IWOSS sectors in Uganda. The section further delves into employment patterns and other salient features of employment in the country. Section 4 analyzes growth patterns in terms of output, productivity, and exports with emphasis on the role of IWOSS in structural transformation. Section 5 analyzes the specific characteristics regarding sectoral employment and comparisons are made between IWOSS and non-IWOSS sectors as well as manufacturing. Section 6 presents the growth constraints that IWOSS sectors face. Section 7 provides projections for the size of labor force by 2029/30 according to skill groups, projections that inform discussion on the skills gaps that need to be filled to solve current employment gaps. Section 8 presents firm-level surveys that provide insights into future employment requirements and the need for digital skills along the IWOSS value chains selected for this study (horticulture, agro-industry, and tourism). Section 9 concludes with policy recommendations to leverage IWOSS sectors for employment generation, especially for youth.
Download the full working paper
The power of technical and vocational skills: Increasing girls’ participation in formal agriculture education in Afghanistan
In March 2021, I visited an agriculture and veterinary institute (AVI) in northern Balkh province in Afghanistan. With state-of-the-art educational infrastructure and labs, the institute is built on about 250 acres of land in the outskirts of Mazar e Sharif. The AVI is separated from the surrounding villages by the walls of an old castle. Beyond the walls, you see women and girls working in the agricultural fields. However, inside the walls—contrary to expectations—very few girls are pursuing formal agriculture education within the institute. The question is, why? Why have we been unable to fill these empty classrooms with students from outside the walls of the institute?
In the informal sector, women and girls from all socioeconomic and religious backgrounds actively participate in agricultural activities. Indeed, a 2017 study found that 70 percent of rural women are directly or indirectly involved in agriculture. They learn and transfer agricultural skills through informal processes with family and friends.
According to a 2018 report by the World Bank, 40 percent of the total labor force is employed in agriculture, and in rural areas more than half of the workforce is busy in the sector. Agriculture is considered the backbone of the Afghan economy, and women the backbone of agriculture, through unpaid labor. The Afghanistan Growth Agenda identified agriculture as one of the top growth sectors in the country, and the National Comprehensive Agriculture Development Priority Program prioritized an aggressive policy goal strengthening women’s role in growing and increasing food production at the household and commercial levels to ensure food security.
While national policies are calling for equal access to education, the question remains why girls’ participation in formal agriculture education remains low, particularly in rural communities.
The National Strategy on Women in Agriculture recognized formal agriculture education and women’s skill development as essential to inclusive agricultural development and called for the enhancement of vocational and skills training for women and girls. While national policies are calling for equal access to education, the question remains why girls’ participation in formal agriculture education remains low, particularly in rural communities. There are several key challenges that require further research.
Challenges
1. Low participation of girls in agricultural education
The Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Authority of Afghanistan manages about 380 technical and vocational high schools and institutes across the country, of which about half are dedicated to agricultural education—or at least teaching agriculture as a trade. However, in 2020, of the 20,000 students studying agriculture in TVET programs, only around 3,000 are girls, and most of them are studying in urban areas. Of the 34 provinces nationwide, nine have less than 50 girls enrolled in agriculture schools and institutes; in another nine, there are no girls enrolled in formal agriculture education at all.
2. Perceptions of agricultural education
Agricultural education is perceived by society as second-class education. As one female teacher at an agriculture institute commented, “When I heard that through Kankor [the national higher education entrance] exam I got [accepted] to the agriculture faculty, I cried for one week. I wanted to become a doctor.” In my survey as a part of the Echidna Global Scholars program, of the 82 female students already studying at the agriculture faculty at Balkh University, only 12 respondents selected agriculture as their top choice. Further, of the 55 female students already studying at the AVI in Balkh, only 21 selected agriculture faculty as their top choice in Kankor. Since they could not get to the four-year undergraduate program, they are now pursuing a two-year degree program at the AVI. My survey indicates that female students are more inclined toward law and political sciences and medical sciences instead of agriculture. In some instances, even agriculture faculty professors questioned female students on why they were not studying something else instead of agriculture.
3. Lack of female teachers
Female teachers account for 4 percent of the total teachers in agriculture. Of the 1,248 teachers in agricultural schools and institutes in the country, only 54 are female, half of them hired on short-term contracts. The lower number of female students in agricultural education results in a lack of female teachers to serve as role models, resulting in a vicious cycle in which the small number of female teachers leads to a lack of interest among female graduates in teaching agriculture as a career, which attracts fewer female students, and so on.
4. Lack of financial resources
The TVET Authority would require substantial additional funding to increase and expand TVET and agricultural education for girls, yet it is unclear where this funding would come from. The current TVET Strategy (2019-2024) outlines the establishment of eight special TVET schools for girls, but no reference is made as to how or where these schools would be built, and the strategy does not mention how such construction would be financed nor where the funds would come from for their operation.
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As an Echidna Global Scholar, I will investigate pathways that could potentially address some of these daunting challenges, reviewing policies that currently support or hinder girls’ participation in formal agriculture education. I hope that my work at the Center for Universal Education will contribute to girls’ greater participation in TVET—particularly in formal agriculture education in Afghanistan—so that technical and vocational skills can help unleash their potential and enable them to more effectively participate in the national growth and economic development of the country.
What is swing pricing?
The problem
In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., investors pulled more than $100 billion out of corporate investment-grade and high-yield bond mutual funds, forcing funds to sell some of their holdings. The spread between corporate bond yields and U.S. Treasuries (a market that had its own dysfunction) widened, transaction costs rose, and issuance of new bonds came to a halt, disrupting the flow of credit to the nation’s corporations. This led the Federal Reserve to intervene by offering, for the first time, to buy corporate bonds and exchange traded corporate bond funds in what proved a successful effort to keep credit to corporations flowing. It was an extraordinary move that underscores the risks these funds pose to financial stability. (For details, see this Federal Reserve note.)
The growth of open-end fixed income funds magnifies the systemic significance of the tension between shareholders’ expectations of daily liquidity and the (often illiquid) holdings of the funds. The average corporate bond is traded about once a month. Shareholders in an open-end bond fund expect (and receive in many cases) to be able to sell their shares much more easily and quickly than if they held bonds directly. When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney said, “These funds are built on a lie, which is that you can have daily liquidity, and that for assets that fundamentally aren’t liquid.”
In normal times, redemptions are modest and can be met by an offsetting inflow of funds or by selling liquid securities in the portfolio like Treasuries.[1] But big outflows can force a fund to sell holdings of less liquid securities that may require a price concession to attract a buyer. Especially in times of stress, big sales force down bond prices because of the absence of a truly liquid market for the underlying bonds. This, in turn, raises the rates that all corporate borrowers have to pay on newly issued bonds—if they can sell them at all—thus harming the overall economy.
Shareholders in a fund who get out early can redeem at a better price than those who remain, because their redemptions are met before the fire sale forces the fund to mark down the value of its portfolio. This creates a “first-mover advantage,” which can induce a rush to the door that amplifies the price movements that would otherwise occur. (With equity funds, this is less of an issue. Most equities are traded in highly liquid markets where prices quickly reflect order flow. To be sure, there are small stocks that do not trade every day, but most trade every few days, and there is not enough volume in any single small stock to create a problem. The average corporate bond trades once a month; some commercial paper hardly ever trades. So any selling of such fixed-income securities can affect the price substantially.)
A possible solution
More widespread adoption of swing pricing. Swing pricing is widely used in Europe but not in the U.S., although its use was authorized by the SEC in 2018. Basically, it allows the manager of an open-end fund to adjust its net asset value up or down when inflows or outflows of securities exceed some threshold. In this way, a fund can pass along to first movers the cost associated with their trading activity, better protect existing shareholders from dilution, and reduce the threats to financial stability.
This brief draws from the report of the Task Force on Financial Stability, which recommended more widespread use of swing pricing, and a roundtable the Task Force convened with industry, academic, and public sector officials to consider the pros, cons, challenges and costs to doing so.
What is an NAV, and why is that important for open-end funds?
The net asset value (NAV) is the price at which shareholders can purchase or sell their shares in an open-end mutual fund. The Investment Company Act of 1940 requires mutual funds to offer and redeem shares at the next net asset value calculated by the fund after receipt of an order. The NAV is usually calculated by dividing the value of the fund’s assets by the number of its shares. With swing pricing, this calculation of the NAV is adjusted up or down to account for the price impact and transactions costs that will be incurred because of redemptions and new share purchases that will occur after the NAV is calculated. Most U.S. funds calculate their daily NAV using the closing market price of the securities at 4:00 pm Eastern time. Orders from investors that are submitted after 4:00 pm are executed at the next day’s NAV.
Open-end funds can issue an unlimited number of shares. In contrast, a closed-end fund has a set number of shares, the price of which is determined in the market and can diverge from the net asset value of the underlying assets. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) combine characteristics of open-end and closed-end funds. The price of ETFs fluctuates throughout the day and is determined by the price in the market. The movement in ETF prices is indicative of the kind of swing in an NAV that might be needed in stress, because the ETF price adjusts to attract a willing buyer.
What is dilution and the first-mover advantage in open-end funds?
If shareholders redeem a large quantity of shares in an open-end mutual fund, the fund may be forced to sell not only the highly liquid U.S. Treasuries it holds, but other assets as well. If many funds are doing the same thing at the same time—as they were in March 2020—the price of their underlying assets can fall; this is known as a “fire sale.” The first redeemer or first mover gets out at the initial NAV, which does not reflect the price declines associated with the subsequent fire sale, leaving the remaining investors to bear the costs associated with the portfolio manager having to sell assets to satisfy the first movers. This decline in the value of the fund’s holdings, which are owned by the remaining investors, is known as “dilution.” In a stress situation, therefore, investors have strong incentives to be among the “first movers,” which itself can amplify redemptions and resulting fire sales.
Using data on daily fund flows, Falato, Goldstein, and Hortacsu find that between February and March 2020, the average bond fund experienced outflows of about 10% of net asset value, far larger than the 2.2% experienced during the peak of the 2013 taper tantrum. They find that fund illiquidity and vulnerability to fire-sale spillovers were the primary drivers of these outflows, and that the “more fragile funds benefitted relatively more from the announcement effect of the Fed facilities.”
How does swing pricing address this issue?
Swing pricing is a mechanism to apportion the costs of redemption and purchase requests on the shareholders whose orders caused the trades. It is designed so that remaining shareholders don’t bear all the costs (including dilution) caused by first movers. In effect, those attempting to take advantage of limited fund liquidity are charged for their redemptions by adjusting the price they receive to reflect the liquidity of the market for the fund’s assets. With swing pricing, the incentive to be a first mover is diminished, and with it the risk that existing shareholders will be diluted and the risk that large redemptions will drive prices down sharply with spillover effects on the market and the economy. To be fair both to those who sell and those who remain, a swing price must reflect a fair valuation and approximate the costs imposed by first movers; it cannot be set simply to impose an enormous penalty on redeeming shareholders.
Under full swing pricing, the NAV is adjusted daily for the likely costs of redemptions, regardless of the amount of shareholder activity. Under partial swing pricing, the adjustment is triggered only when net redemptions exceed some pre-determined threshold—a recognition that small transactions do not pose much of a problem.
How does swing pricing work in Europe?
Many global open-end mutual funds are based in Luxembourg (because it has a favorable regulatory climate), and many of those routinely use swing pricing.
Not all funds follow the same procedures, but here’s an illustrative example. All orders that will be redeemed at a given day’s NAV must be received by noon CET on the day of the trade. In that case, any orders received after noon will be processed at the next day’s NAV. The NAV itself is not set until 4 pm CET each day. This gives the fund four hours to assess its order imbalance and determine the gap between buy and sell orders. Most buy and sell orders can be “crossed,” so that rather than buying and selling new securities, the redeeming and purchasing customers can have ownership transferred without incurring any transactions costs or putting pressure on prices. If there is a net imbalance (say, many more requests to redeem than to purchase), then to meet the net demands, some securities will need to be sold. If there is a large imbalance, then the NAV is adjusted (or “swung”) to reflect the impact of the sales.
The swing threshold is the amount of net subscriptions or redemptions that trigger the adjustment to the NAV. The fund then estimates how much prices for the assets being sold are likely to move to meet the subscription or redemption requests it has received; other factors taken into account include transaction costs and the bid-ask spread. The fund then uses those estimates to adjust the NAV by some percentage, generally no more than 2% or 3%. The adjustment is known as the swing factor.
Swing thresholds and swing factors vary depending on the market for the fund’s underlying securities. Swing factors tend to be larger in funds that invest in more thinly traded securities.
Fund managers set the rules and size of the adjustment and disclose their procedures, but precise details are not always disclosed so as to avoid investors exploiting them unfairly. A bond fund prospectus might, for instance, set a maximum swing factor of 3%, but give the fund discretion up to that level.[2] (For an example, see paragraph 17.3 of the prospectus for BlackRock’s Luxembourg-based global funds. )
Here is a stylized example of partial swing pricing from Allianz. It shows the threshold (the volume of orders) that trigger swing pricing in normal markets and in times of distressed markets, and the size of the swing under various scenarios (0.5% or 1.0%).
A survey by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority of 272 U.K. mutual funds found that 83% (202 funds) have the option to use swing pricing in place. Most funds using partial swing pricing had a trigger of net flows of 2% or less of total NAV. During COVID, however, several funds used their discretion and reduced their swing threshold or moved to full swing pricing. Swing pricing is advantageous to investors not only because it mutes dilution, but because the fund needs to hold fewer lower-yielding highly liquid assets to meet redemptions.
Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements compared the track record of Luxembourg-based funds (which generally use swing pricing) to similar U.S.-based funds (which do not use swing pricing). They found that the Luxembourg-based funds hold less cash than their U.S. counterparts. They also found that during the 2013 taper tantrum, the Luxembourg funds had higher returns than their U.S. counterparts (in part because there was less dilution and in part because they hold less cash), though there was more daily volatility in the Luxembourg funds.
In addition to the Luxembourg-based funds, funds based in the U.K., Ireland, France, Netherlands, and recently Germany use swing pricing.
While investor fairness has been the primary driver of swing pricing in Europe, market participants say it can affect investor behavior in ways that may contribute to financial stability. If an investor has a very large order to place in a European-based fund, the investor may spread out the purchase or sale over several days or otherwise break up the order to avoid imposing costs on the mutual fund that will be passed along in an adjusted swing price.
What are the impediments to implementing swing pricing in the U.S.?
The institutional structure of the market and operational issues are the main impediments to embracing swing pricing in the U.S.
Although the NAV is usually set at 4:00 pm Eastern time every trading day, many U.S. funds don’t know the size of their net inflows and outflows until late in the day or even the next morning. Many funds receive order flows from intermediaries that stand between an investor and the fund, such as 401k plan administrators, broker-dealers, and financial advisers. Some intermediaries have agreements that allow them to receive requests until 4:00 pm Eastern but not convey the order to the fund until that evening or even the next morning, but then upon passing them on still have the order serviced at that 4:00 pm NAV. In other words, the fund managers determine the NAV before they know how large the flow of orders is. Such agreements would need to be renegotiated and the software systems used by the intermediaries would need to be overhauled if new redemption rules were to be put in place. The intermediaries would also need to rework their client agreements.
Industry participants noted the following additional considerations:
Setting a cutoff at 12:00 noon New York time for investors to place mutual fund orders at today’s NAV would be 9:00 am in California and 6:00 am in Hawaii. But global funds based in Luxembourg deal with even more time zones and have navigated this problem.
Retirement fund record keepers and insurance companies require actual NAVs to process trades, e.g. an investor who wants to sell $1 million worth of shares need to know an NAV to translate the $1 million into an actual number of shares. European funds often price such trades at yesterday’s NAV.
Smaller fund management companies may not have the resources to implement swing prices.
In any event, changing all this would be costly and would require a mandate from the Securities and Exchange Commission and coordination with other regulators, including the Department of Labor (which has oversight over retirement plans) and FINRA, among others. No single fund or group of funds will make this shift unless everyone else is doing so as well.
If a shift were mandated, the same rules would need to be applied to other types of savings vehicles that are economically similar to mutual funds, such as bank collective investment trusts.
When it authorized swing pricing in the U.S. in 2018, the SEC said, “We…appreciate the extent of operational changes that will be necessary for many funds to conduct swing pricing and that these changes may still be costly to implement, but we were not persuaded by commenters who argued that these changes are insurmountable, and indeed one stated that despite these challenges ‘the long-term benefits of enabling swing pricing for U.S. open-end mutual funds outweigh the one-time costs related to implementation for industry participants.’”
What are the alternatives to full-scale swing pricing?
One alternative would be for funds to consult and gather information from intermediaries and vendors a few hours before 4:00 pm, and then allow (or mandate) the fund managers to estimate a full-day’s flows and apply a swing factor if indicated. This would accomplish some, perhaps even much, of the benefits of swing pricing without the cost of reorganizing the whole network of vendors, intermediaries, and fund managers. It probably would require a safe harbor to protect intermediaries, vendors, and funds from liability if the estimates proved inaccurate.
The SEC anticipated such a possibility in its 2018 rule: “We acknowledge that full information about shareholder flows is not likely to be available to funds by the time such funds need to make the decision as to whether the swing threshold has been crossed, but we do not believe that complete information is necessary to make a reasonable high confidence estimate. Instead, a fund may determine its shareholder flows have crossed the swing threshold based on receipt of sufficient information about the fund shareholders’ daily purchase and redemption transaction activity to allow the fund to reasonably estimate, with high confidence, whether it has crossed the swing threshold.”
Other ways that have been discussed to mitigate the impact of transaction costs to a mutual fund’s portfolio generated by subscriptions and redemptions, as well as to reduce the risks to financial stability, are:
An anti-dilution levy or redemption fee—a surcharge on investors subscribing or redeeming shares to offset the effect of those orders.
Dual pricing, i.e. one price for buying shares and another for redeeming.
Notice periods of perhaps a few days before an order can be executed.
Redemption in kind, e.g. giving the shareholder bonds, not cash (not practical for funds with retail investors).
Restricted redemption rights so investors can redeem up to a certain dollar amount on any one day.
Redemption gates that allow a fund to limit withdrawals (although the experience with these for money market funds indicates that such gates tend to exacerbate the rush for the exits).
A regulatory mandate to align redemption policies (including a requirement of advance notice) with the liquidity of the underlying securities.
Does the rising popularity of Exchange Traded Funds change any of these considerations?
ETFs require that buyers and sellers agree on a price that reflects market conditions. So during periods of stress, ETF prices move considerably. In a sense, they have an element of swing pricing built into them. Some investors may prefer ETFs because they know that it will be possible to sell on short notice.
ETFs have their own issues regarding the infrastructure that is needed to support them. To make sure the fund price reflects the value of the securities that the fund is supposed to track, ETFs rely on firms that serve as “authorized participants” (APs) to step in to buy or sell the fund to keep the price of the ETF close to the underlying securities. The APs make profits by arbitraging differences in the prices in the underlying securities and the ETFs. If the APs step back from trading, say, because they are exposed to more risk than they are comfortable with, the ETF prices can become disconnected from the prices of the securities that they are supposed to mimic.
This risk can mean that the ETF prices can also fail to reflect only fundamental risks associated with the securities. Nonetheless, ETFs are not subject to the first mover advantage and seemed to handle March 2020 better than the open-end funds.
Can swing pricing help improve the stability of money market mutual funds?
Money market funds are a special kind of open-end fund that can hold only short-dated securities such as U.S. Treasury bills, commercial paper, and certificates of deposit. By limiting the securities to those deemed relatively safe and liquid, it is expected that the price of the fund will be stable as the securities have no price risk if held to maturity. Problems can—and do—still arise for money market funds if they sell the securities they hold before maturity; in that case, there is price risk. Prime money market mutual funds invest in short-term private-sector securities such as commercial paper and certificates of deposit. Default rates on these securities are low, but they trade infrequently so they are subject to the same kind of illiquidity problems as open-end bond and loan funds.
Prime money market mutual funds suffered a run in March 2020, leading commercial paper markets to freeze up and prompting the Federal Reserve to intervene to keep credit flowing to businesses.
Investors in prime money market funds generally are using these funds as substitutes for bank accounts. They expect to withdraw, possibly large amounts in some circumstances, and at multiple times during the day. As a result, these funds often set an NAV multiple times throughout the day. Some in the industry say that feature of these funds means the information demands of setting a swing would be daunting and incompatible with how investors use them. Still, in a June 2021 consultation report, the Financial Stability Board included swing pricing among several possible policy responses to the problems posed by money market mutual funds.
[1] Heavy selling of Treasuries during the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic created problems in that market as well. See Chapter 3 of the report of the Task Force on Financial Stability and the Group of Thirty report, “U.S. Treasury Markets: Steps Toward Increased Liquidity.”
[2] When the SEC authorized swing pricing in the U.S. in 2018, it set a 2% ceiling on the swing factor.
Anil Kashyap is a member of the Financial Policy Committee of the Bank of England and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the European Central Bank. He did not receive financial supportfrom any firm or person with a relevant financial or political interest in this piece.
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