This paper examines the drivers of fluctuations in global inflation, defined as a common factor across monthly headline consumer price index (CPI) inflation in G7 countries, over the past half-century...
Almost two-thirds of emerging market and developing economies rely heavily on resource sectors for economic activity, fiscal and export revenues. In these economies, economic planning requires sound baseline...
Potential growth—the rate of expansion an economy can sustain at full capacity and employment—is a critical driver of development progress. It is also a major input in the formulation of fiscal and monetary...
International trade has been an important engine of output and productivity growth historically. But since the global financial crisis, world trade growth has slowed, reflecting cyclical and structural...
Potential output growth around the world slowed over the past two decades. This slowdown is expected to continue in the remainder of the 2020s: global potential growth is projected to average 2.2 percent...
This paper examines the global drivers of inflation in 55 countries over 1970–2022. The paper estimates a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression model for each country and assess the importance of several...
Financial development reduces the cost of accessing external financing and thus incentivizes investment in higher-productivity projects that allow firms to expand to the scale needed to operate in the...
A large percentage of workers and firms operate in the informal economy, outside the line of sight of governments in emerging market and developing economies. This may hold back the recovery in these economies...
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on debt, puts recent debt developments and prospects in historical context, and analyzes new policy challenges associated with debt...
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a massive increase in global debt levels and exacerbated the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of accumulating government debt. This paper examines these trade-offs...
Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt...
This paper introduces a global database that contains inflation series: (i) for a wide range of inflation measures (headline, food, energy, and core consumer price inflation; producer price inflation;...
Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past 50 years. In emerging market and developing economies, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The...
The COVID-19-triggered collapse in oil prices in March and April 2020 was the seventh, and by far the most severe, in a series of such collapses since 1970. This paper, first, compares this most recent...
The outbreak of COVID-19 and the wide-ranging measures needed to slow its advance triggered an unprecedented collapse in oil demand, a surge in oil inventories, and a record one-month decline in oil prices...
Episodes of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. Since 2010, emerging and developing economies have experienced another wave of historically...
Global potential output growth has been flagging. At 2.5 percent in 2013-17, post-crisis potential growth is 0.5 percentage point below its longer-term average and 0.9 percentage point below its average...
Government debt has risen substantially in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) since the global financial crisis. The current environment of low global interest rates and weak growth may appear...
Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing...
Emerging market and developing economies have experienced recurrent episodes of rapid debt accumulation over the past fifty years. This paper examines the consequences of debt accumulation using a three-pronged...