You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Forecasting macroeconomic variables is key to developing a view on a country's economic outlook. Most traditional forecasting models rely on fitting data to a pre-specified relationship between input and output variables, thereby assuming a specific functional and stochastic process underlying that process. We pursue a new approach to forecasting by employing a number of machine learning algorithms, a method that is data driven, and imposing limited restrictions on the nature of the true relationship between input and output variables. We apply the Elastic Net, SuperLearner, and Recurring Neural Network algorithms on macro data of seven, broadly representative, advanced and emerging economies and find that these algorithms can outperform traditional statistical models, thereby offering a relevant addition to the field of economic forecasting.
Selected Issues
This study asseses India s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which is falling well short of its potential impact on poverty in one of India s poorest states, Bihar. Information campaigns are needed to assure that poor people are aware of their rights and the administration of the scheme needs to be more responsive to their needs.
For over a century the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession's influence over the lives of others. Economists have proven to be disinterested in ethics. Embracing emotivism, they often treat ethics a matter of mere preference. Moreover, economists tend to be hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, profess...
Indonesia has responded with a bold and comprehensive policy package to cushion the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The economy rebounded in the third quarter of 2020, and the economic recovery is projected to strengthen in 2021 and 2022. Strong policy support and an improving global economy will be the main drivers initially, and greater mobility and confidence will follow with the planned vaccination program in 2021. The uncertainty surrounding the growth outlook is larger than usual. Early completion of a widespread vaccination program is an upside risk, while a protracted pandemic remains a downside risk. The macro-financial fallout of the pandemic and economic downturn could be larger than expected, and credit conditions could be slow to improve. Ongoing reforms aimed at promoting investment are expected to help mitigate the scarring effects from the pandemic and put the economy on a sustained growth path that builds on Indonesia’s favorable demographics.
Since 2008, many countries across the globe have witnessed the introduction of new recovery and resolution regimes for banks. Whereas much may have been achieved on regional levels, this has not been perfect, and many global challenges remain unsolved. The Research Handbook on Cross-Border Bank Resolution analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the current regulatory framework for cross-border bank crises with contributions from eminent experts from the US, EU, Japan and China. The topic is addressed from both economic, and legal perspectives, with a special section devoted to real-life cases.
Since at least the Great Financial Crisis, authorities around the world have increasingly relied on macroprudential policy to help secure financial stability and complement monetary policy as an integral element of a broader macro-financial stability framework. In today's interconnected global financial system, policy actions taken by the major advanced economies can have spillovers on the rest of the world through their impact on capital flows and exchange rates, potentially generating vulnerabilities across borders. Conversely, in emerging market economies, macroprudential policy as well as foreign exchange intervention and/or capital flow management policy can help mitigate the correspond...
Cyber risk has emerged as a key threat to financial stability, following recent attacks on financial institutions. This paper presents a novel documentation of cyber risk around the world for financial institutions by analyzing the different types of cyber incidents (data breaches, fraud and business disruption) and identifying patterns using a variety of datasets. The other novel contribution that is outlined is a quantitative framework to assess cyber risk for the financial sector. The framework draws on a standard VaR type framework used to assess various types of stability risk and can be easily applied at the individual country level. The framework is applied in this paper to the available cross-country data and yields illustrative aggregated losses for the financial sector in the sample across a variety of scenarios ranging from 10 to 30 percent of net income.
This paper identifies five key issues that are important for the continued efforts to tackle gender inequality: (i) gender inequality needs to be distinguished from gender gaps. Not all gender gaps necessarily reflect gender inequality as some gender gaps are not driven by the lack of equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities bywomen and girls, and this has important implications on policy designs to address gender inequity. However, the literature has paid little attention to this issue, often using gender inequality and gender gaps interchangeably; (ii) the evolving focus of gender inequality suggests there is still a long way to go to fully address gender inequality. Particularly g...
A new wave of technological innovations, often called “fintech,” is accelerating change in the financial sector. What impact might fintech have on financial services, and how should regulation respond? This paper sets out an economic framework for thinking through the channels by which fintech might provide solutions that respond to consumer needs for trust, security, privacy, and better services, change the competitive landscape, and affect regulation. It combines a broad discussion of trends across financial services with a focus on cross-border payments and especially the impact of distributed ledger technology. Overall, the paper finds that boundaries among different types of service providers are blurring; barriers to entry are changing; and improvements in cross-border payments are likely. It argues that regulatory authorities need to balance carefully efficiency and stability trade-offs in the face of rapid changes, and ensure that trust is maintained in an evolving financial system. It also highlights the importance of international cooperation.