You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is...
Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers’ discretion and curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challenging. Using the latest (2016) vintage of the IMF Fiscal Council Dataset, we focus on two tasks expected to strengthen fiscal performance: the preparation or assessment of forecasts, and the monitoring of compliance with fiscal rules. Tentative econometric evidence suggests that the presence of a fiscal council is associated with more accurate and less optimistic fiscal forecasts, as well as greater compliance with fiscal rules.
This book is a collection of academic lectures given on fintech, a topic that has been written about extensively but only from a business or technological point of view. In contrast to other publications on the subject, this book shows the reader how fintech should be understood in relation to economics, financial theory, policy, and law. It provides introductory explanations on fintech-related concepts and instruments such as blockchains, crypto assets, machine learning, high-frequency trading, and AI. The collected lectures also point to surrounding issues including start-ups, monetary policy, asset management, cyber and other security, and stability of financial systems. The authors include professors, a former central bank official, current officials at Japan’s Financial Services Authority, a lawyer, the former dean of the Asian Development Bank Institute, and private sector professionals at the frontline of fintech. The book is most suitable for those both within and outside of academia who are beginning to learn about fintech and wish to successfully take part in the revolution that is certain to have wide-ranging effects on our economy and society.
None
The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity.The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a lar...
How nations can promote peace, prosperity, and stability through cohesive political institutions "Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters—places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and hig...
The second in CEPR's annual Monitoring European Deregulation (MED) series, this report explores the economic and regulatory aspects of a single European market for electricity and provides a basis for policy choices both at national and EU levels. The report combines analyses of key issues in electricity market integration and liberalization with evaluations of practical experiences in selected European countries: France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Key issues include: to what extent competition in national electricity markets is a necessary requirement for the integration of these markets, and the design of national electricity markets in which competition in generation and supply is allowed. Lars Bergman is at the Stockholm School of Economics; Gert Brunekreeft is at Institut fuer Verkehrswissenschaft, University of Freiburg; Chris Doyle is at the London Business School; David M G Newbery and Michael Pollitt are at Cambridge University; Pierre Regibeau is at Institut d'Analisi Economica CSIC, Bellaterra; and Nils von der Fehr is at Nuffield College, Oxford.