While unconventional monetary policies have been appropriately anti-cyclical in ACs implementing them, they have had inappropriately pro-cyclical consequences on EMs -- boosting credit and demand when most economies among the latter were already heated up, and threatening to accentuate a slowdown where it started to happen.
Using gross figures of exports and imports to approach the contribution of trade to economic growth and a country’s resource allocation may be misleading. Products often cross borders more…
First appeared at World Bank Growth and Crisis blog A country’s income depends on its accumulated wealth and how efficiently and innovatively this wealth is employed to produce goods and services.…
The global financial crisis and shrinking aid flows have led to decreased availability of long-term debt finance for Least Developed Countries (LDCs), particularly for infrastructure. On the other hand,…
The adjustment to the “normalization” of the US monetary policy may end up being not as disruptive as many analysts are expecting. It will depend on the pace of recovery in the US economy and/or the smoothness of China’s adjustment-cum-slowdown . However, to fully overcome the current turmoil, EMs must not lose sight of their country-specific reform agendas.
International long-term private finance to developing countries has changed dramatically in the wake of the global financial crisis. Caught in “post-crisis blues”, as my World Bank colleagues Jeff Chelsky,…
China and Brazil are both facing a growth slowdown, as compared to the period prior to the global financial crisis. They were both able to respond with aggressive anti-cyclical policies to the post-Lehman quasi-collapse of the global economy. In both cases, such policies led to a growth rebound by reinvigorating previous patterns of growth. This brought forth the exhaustion of such patterns and the need to transit to other growth regimes.
Brazil’s GDP performance has been lackluster since the post-crisis rebound in 2010. Prospects for 2013 look a little better: unemployment rates have remained low, and data from the first…
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is taking a new look at Sovereign Debt Restructuring. There are at least two major reasons for this: First, it is expected that official creditors…
Despite tremendous progress in poverty reduction over the last two decades, poverty still persists. Along with South Asia, Africa is a region where large numbers of people continue to live…
The metamorphosis of the dragon may involve painful growing pains, including the risks of a hard landing that many analysts attribute to the current transition. The forthcoming two decades are setting the next stage of a half-century that could be marked by dramatic economic transformation, creating both challenges and opportunities for China and the rest of the world.
VoxEU The global financial crisis has shattered the confidence of many established principles of monetary policy and financial supervision. This column argues that the two should not remain separate,…
As part of their response to negative shocks coming from advanced economies after the Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008, most developing countries resorted to countercyclical fiscal policy. Such a…
If the global financial crisis -- and the events that led up to it -- have taught us anything, it is,“No complacency with asset price booms”. We know first…
