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Feeling the Heat: Adapting to Climate Change in the Middle East and Central Asia
Climate change is among humanity’s greatest challenges, and the Middle East and Central Asia region is on the frontlines of its human, economic, and physical ramifications. Much of the region is located in already difficult climate zones, where global warming exacerbates desertification, water stress, and rising sea levels. This trend entails fundamental economic disruptions, endangers food security, and undermines public health, with ripple effects on poverty and inequality, displacement, and conflict. Considering the risks posed by climate change, the central message of this departmental paper is that adapting to climate change by boosting resilience to climate stresses and disasters is a critical priority for the region’s economies.
Preparing Financial Sectors for a Green Future
The financial sectors of the Middle East and Central Asia (ME&CA) countries should play an important role in supporting climate-related policies for the region. The sectors are vulnerable to downside risks from climate-related shocks and at the same time offer the potential to help fill the financing gap for needed adaptation and mitigation strategies. Successful approaches to climate change in the region therefore need to coherently integrate financial sector strategies within the overall policy framework to meet this important challenge. To this end, policymakers must ensure that financial sectors are prepared for a green future. This means enhancing the resilience of banks to physical and...
Corporate Indebtedness and Low Productivity Growth of Italian Firms
Productivity growth in Italy has been persistently anemic and has lagged that of the euro area over the period 1999-2015, while the indebtedness of its corporate sector has increased. Using the ORBIS firm-level database, this paper studies the long-term impact of persistent corporate-debt accumulation on the productivity growth of Italian firms and investigates whether total factor productivity growth varies with the level of corporate indebtedness. We employ a novel estimation technique proposed by Chudik, Mohaddes, Pesaran, and Raissi (2017) to account for dynamics, bi-directional feedback effects, cross-firm heterogeneity, and cross-sectional dependence arising from unobserved common fact...
State-Owned Enterprises in Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia: Size, Costs, and Challenges
Prior to the COVID-19 shock, the key challenge facing policymakers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia region was how to generate strong, sustainable, job-rich, inclusive growth. Post-COVID-19, this challenge has only grown given the additional reduction in fiscal space due to the crisis and the increased need to support the recovery. The sizable state-owned enterprise (SOE) footprint in the region, together with its cost to the government, call for revisiting the SOE sector to help open fiscal space and look for growth opportunities.
A Low-Carbon Future for the Middle East and Central Asia: What are the Options?
Nearly all countries in the Middle East and Central Asia have pledged to contain greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris Agreement. The purpose of this paper is to identify the menu of fiscal policy options which would allow the region to fulfil its missions reduction commitment. Specifically, the paper examines and estimates the tradeoff between two broad categories of fiscal policies: public investments in renewable sources of energy and measures that raise the effective price of fossil fuels. Such a dichotomy captures the key medium-term macroeconomic and long-term intergenerational trade-offs that are arguably the most pertinent for the countries in the Middle East and Central Asia...
How Have IMF Priorities Evolved? A Text Mining Approach
This paper assess how priorities of the IMF’s membership have evolved over the past two decades, by using text mining techniques on a unique dataset combining IMFC communiqués and constituency statements. Our results reveal significant variation in priorities across time and constituencies. Statements can be characterized by the weight which they place on three key priorities: (i) growth; (ii) debt and development; and (iii) crisis management and quota reform. Sentiment analysis techniques also show that addressing climate change is a topic which is viewed positively by an increasing number of constituencies.
Macro-Fiscal Implications of Adaptation to Climate Change
Adaptation to climate change is an integral part of sustainable development and a necessity for advanced and developing economies alike. How can adaptation be planned for and mainstreamed into fiscal policy? Setting up inclusive coordination mechanisms and strengthening legal foundations to incorporate climate change can be a prerequisite. This Note identifies four building blocks: 1. Taking stock of present and future climate risks, identifying knowledge and capacity gaps, and establishing guidance for next steps. 2. Developing adaptation solutions. This block can be guided by extending the IMF three-pillar disaster resilience strategy to address changes in both extreme and average weather ...
Regional Economic Outlook, October 2021, Middle East and Central Asia: Trade-Offs Today for Transformation Tomorrow
A fragile recovery continues in the Middle East and Central Asia region. The region has made good progress since the beginning of the year, but new challenges have emerged. They include a pandemic wave in countries with weak vaccination progress and rising inflation, which has contributed to declining monetary policy space, adding to the difficulties posed by limited fiscal policy space. Additionally, divergent recoveries and concerns about economic scarring persist. Inequities are also on the rise, and countries will need to tackle the pandemic’s impact on debt, labor markets, and the corporate sector. Countries will face difficult tradeoffs amid this challenging environment as they conti...
Promoting Inclusive Growth in the Middle East and North Africa
Despite some pre-pandemic gains in poverty reduction, literacy, and lifespans, many economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have struggled to ensure that the benefits of economic development and diversification accrue equitably to all segments of their populations. Among the main issues that remain unresolved are the high share of inactive youth (who are not engaged in employment, education, or training); large gaps in economic opportunities for women; fragmented social protection systems; and underdeveloped private sectors with tight regulation, absence of a level playing field, and limited access to credit that stifle the creation of new firms and growth, employment, and incom...
The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance: Active Diversifiers and the Rise of Nontraditional Reserve Currencies
We document a decline in the dollar share of international reserves since the turn of the century. This decline reflects active portfolio diversification by central bank reserve managers; it is not a byproduct of changes in exchange rates and interest rates, of reserve accumulation by a small handful of central banks with large and distinctive balance sheets, or of changes in coverage of surveys of reserve composition. Strikingly, the decline in the dollar’s share has not been accompanied by an increase in the shares of the pound sterling, yen and euro, other long-standing reserve currencies and units that, along with the dollar, have historically comprised the IMF’s Special Drawing Righ...
