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Five years after the onset of the global financial crisis, Europe’s economy is still fragile. Notwithstanding recent positive signs amid calmer financial markets, medium-term growth is likely to remain frail owing to continuing weaknesses and vulnerabilities at the country level and in the fabric of European institutions and banks, especially in the euro area. In addition, unemployment in many countries has reached very high levels. The IMF research collected in this volume provides a number of guideposts that offer an opportunity for stronger and better-balanced growth and employment in Europe after what has been a long and dismal period of crisis.
This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine the historical record, including Budget Speeches and IMFdocuments, to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to prospective economic conditions. Using this new dataset, our estimates suggest fiscal consolidation has contractionary effects on private domestic demand and GDP. By contrast, estimates based on conventional measures of the fiscal policy stance used in the literature support the expansionary fiscal contractions hypothesis but appear to be biased toward overstating expansionary effects.
“Regional cooperation exists, but looks different in the global South than in the European Union,” claim the contributors to South American Policy Regionalism, which offers novel theory, methods, and Latin American case studies of joint governance efforts in nine international policy arenas, ranging from illegal drugs to artificial intelligence. Contrasting three major schools of thought in international relations (highlighting power, institutions, and ideas), this book introduces the idea of international policy regionalism as a framework for informed debate about international policy-sector interactions in a regional space. Beginning with a conceptual approach applicable to any world r...
The first part of the book examines the evolution of monetary policy and prudential frameworks of the ASEAN5, with particular focus on changes since the Asian financial crisis and the more recent period of unconventional monetary policy in advanced economies. The second part of the book looks at policy responses to global financial spillovers. The third and last part of the book elaborates on the challenges ahead for monetary policy, financial stability frameworks, and the deepening of financial markets.
The global financial crisis originated in advanced economies, but had a major impact on emerging markets. The impact, however, was not uniform. Even in a relatively homogenous group of countries such as ASEAN-4 (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand), there were considerable differences both in terms of instantaneous impact of the crisis and in terms of output performance relative to trend. There are several main reasons for the divergence. First, trade shocks had a larger impact on more open economies (Malaysia and Thailand). Second, countercyclical fiscal stimulus in Indonesia and the Philippines was larger and was sustained longer. Third, idiosyncratic factors pushed output up in Indonesia and down in Thailand. Such factors include investment-friendly structural reforms and fortuitously timed election spending in Indonesia, as well as political instability and natural disasters in Thailand.
Pacific island countries face unique challenges to realizing their growth potential and raising living standards. This book discusses ongoing challenges facing Pacific island countries and policy options to address them. Regional cooperation and solutions tailored to their unique challenges, as well as further integration with the Asia and Pacific region will each play a role. With concerted efforts, Pacific island countries can boost potential growth, increase resilience, and improve the welfare of their citizens.
The goal of this paper is to estimate the additional annual spending required for meaningful progress on the SDGs in these areas. Our estimates refer to additional spending in 2030, relative to a baseline of current spending to GDP in these sectors. Toward this end, we apply an innovative costing methodology to a sample of 155 countries: 49 low- income developing countries, 72 emerging market economies, and 34 advanced economies. And we refine the analysis with five country studies: Rwanda, Benin, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Guatemala.
Only a few empirical studies have analyzed the relationship between fiscal multipliers and the underlying state of the economy. This paper investigates this link on a country-by-country basis for the G7 economies (excluding Italy). Our results show that fiscal multipliers differ across countries, calling for a tailored use of fiscal policy. Moreover, the position in the business cycle affects the impact of fiscal policy on output: on average, government spending, and revenue multipliers tend to be larger in downturns than in expansions. This asymmetry has implications for the choice between an upfront fiscal adjustment versus a more gradual approach.
Labor market deregulation, intended to boost productivity and employment, is one plausible, yet little studied, driver of the decline in labor shares that took place across most advanced economies since the early 1990s. This paper assesses the impact of job protection deregulation in a sample of 26 advanced economies over the period 1970-2015, using a newly constructed dataset of major reforms to employment protection legislation for regular contracts. We apply the local projection method to estimate the dynamic response of the labor share to our reform events at both the country and the country-industry levels. For the latter, we employ a differences-in-differences identification strategy u...
This paper investigates what factors affect the duration of sudden stops in capital flows using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. We find that countries with floating exchange rate regimes tend to experience shorter sudden stop episodes and that fixed exchange rate regimes are associated with longer periods of low output growth following sudden stops. These effects are quantitatively large: having a flexible exchange rate regime increases the probability of exiting the sudden stop state by between 50 to 80 percent. Flexible exchange rate regimes significantly shorten the duration of output decelerations following sudden stops by over 30 percent. Positive variations in terms of trade also abbreviate the duration of sudden stops. In terms of policies, identification is trickier, but the evidence suggests that monetary policy tightening shortens the duration of sudden stops. Changes in capital account restrictions do not seem to matter.