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The 2019 Article IV Consultation with Singapore analyses that Singapore’s growth is expected to continue to moderate as export momentum slows and growth drivers shift back to domestic demand. Risks to the near-term outlook are tilted to the downside and arise mainly from external sources. Over the medium term, modern services are expected to become increasingly important in driving growth. The report highlights that policies should be geared toward addressing the challenges to growth and inequality posed by shifts in the global economy, aging, and technological change, which could also promote external rebalancing. Policies have been aimed at boosting growth while promoting greater equity. The authorities are implementing measures to turn Singapore into a global innovation hub, redoubling efforts to boost labor productivity through investment in human, physical and organizational capital, and digitalization. Singapore is also emerging as a regional leader in fintech, supported by Monetary Authority of Singapore. Meanwhile, social policies are being updated, with the aim of raising wages and standards of living for lower-skilled Singaporeans.
Two main themes of the book are that (1) politics can distort optimal fiscal policy through elections and through political fragmentation, and (2) rules and institutions can attenuate the negative effects of this dynamic. The book has three parts: part 1 (9 chapters) outlines the problems; part 2 (6 chapters) outlines how institutions and fiscal rules can offer solutions; and part 3 (4 chapters) discusses how multilevel governance frameworks can help.
Unexpected Propserity explains how Spain managed to avoid the middle income trap. With an original interpretation of the economic rise of Spain, Calvo-Gonzalez addresses questions about the political economy of reform, the role of industrial and public policy, and the enduring legacy of political violence and conflict.
What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention. Centering work in Indigenous studies, Rifkin illustrates how conceptions of family and race work together as part of ongoing efforts to regulate, assault, and efface other political orders. The book examines the history of anthropology and its resonances in contemporary queer scholarship, contemporary Indian policy from the 1970s onward, the legal history of family formation and privacy in the United States, and the association of blackness with criminality across US history. In this way, Rifkin seeks to open new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the United States.
This Selected Issues paper on Nepal measures the extent to which Nepal’s households change their expenditure patterns and labor supply in response to remittances, using the Nepal Household Risk and Vulnerability Survey—2016 and employing a propensity score matching method. This study provides stylized facts on migrant workers and remittance-recipient households (HH), and then analyzes the effect of remittances on HHs' expenditure patterns and labor supply. Reliance on remittances, both at the macro and household levels, makes Nepal highly vulnerable to shifts that could diminish remittance inflows. The slowdown in growth of remittances has been significant since 2016, owing to weak economic performance in major remittance-sending economies and less outward migration. This study also analyzes the effect of remittances on labor market participation of left behind household heads, using a propensity score matching method. The results show that remittances have supported greater consumption of productive goods (such as durable goods, education and health), without discouraging labor supply of remittance-receiving family members.
We attempt to disentangle income and wealth effects on consumption by disaggregating both the different types of income and wealth. We estimate a consumption function for a panel of quarterly data for 14 advanced economies spanning 1998 to 2012, using an error correction specification. We find a significant long-term relation between consumption and the different components of income and wealth. While fiscal policy had direct effects on consumption, the analysis suggests that wealth effects were sizeable, and therefore need to be kept in mind when analyzing consumption trends going forward.
South Asia’s Path to Sustainable and Inclusive Growth highlights the remarkable development progress in South Asia and how the region can advance in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Steps include a renewed push toward greater trade and financial openness, while responding proactively to the distributional impact and dislocation associated with this structural transformation. Promoting a green and digital recovery remains important. The book explores ways to accelerate the income convergence process in the region, leveraging on the still-large potential demographic dividend in most of the countries. These include greater economic diversification and export sophistication, trade and foreign direct investment liberalization and participation in global value chains amid shifting regional and global conditions, financial development, and investment in human capital.
This Selected Issues paper on Colombia shows that achieving investment grade status would help lower financing costs for the sovereign, and expand the pool of potential buyers of the Colombian economy. Colombia’s debt levels as of end-2008 were broadly similar to the average for investment grade emerging markets, suggesting that other indicators are taken into account in rating agencies’ assessments. A stronger process of fiscal consolidation that results in a significant decline in public sector debt could help compensate the structural weaknesses.
In an environment in which growth and employment prospects in many countries remain subdued and a number of high-profile corruption cases have fueled moral outrage, and amid a growing consensus that corruption can seriously undermine a country’s ability to deliver inclusive economic growth in a number of different areas, addressing corruption globally—in both developed and developing countries—has become increasingly urgent. When corruption impairs government functions, it can adversely affect a number of important determinants of economic performance, including macrofinancial stability, investment, human capital accumulation, and total factor productivity. Moreover, when systemic corr...
This Selected Issues paper provides an overview of the exchange rate and trade dynamics in Indonesia. Using data on monthly export and import price and volume at the sectoral level, the paper estimates pass-through effects of exchange rate changes to trade price and volume. Results indicate adjustment frictions that depend on the source of the exchange rate fluctuation and the degree of integration in global value chains. Overall, combining price and volume effects, we find that 10 percent depreciation in the exchange rate is associated with a rise in the goods net-exports of up to 1.6 percent of GDP. Results indicate that there is considerable asymmetry and sectoral heterogeneity in the pas...