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Setting macroeconomic policy is especially difficult in fragile states. Macroeconomic Policy in Fragile States addresses the many issues involved and considers ways to improve the effectiveness of macroeconomic management in the face of these constraints.
This collection of essays explores the reception of classics and translation from modern languages as two different, yet synergic, ways of engaging with literary canons and established traditions in 20th-century Italy. These two areas complement each other and equally contribute to shape several kinds of identities: authorial, literary, national and cultural. Foregrounding the transnational aspects of key concepts such as poetics, literary voice, canon and tradition, the book is intended for scholars and students of Italian literature and culture, classical reception and translation studies. With its two shifting focuses, on forms of classical tradition and forms of literary translation, the volume brings to the fore new configurations of 20th-century literature, culture and thought.
A structural growth slowdown is under way across the world: at current trends, the global rate of potential growth is expected to fall to a three-decade low over the remainder of the 2020s. Nearly all the forces that have powered growth and prosperity since the early 1990s have weakened. In addition, a series of shocks has affected the global economy over the past three years. A persistent and broad-based decline in long-term growth prospects imperils the ability of emerging market and developing economies to combat poverty, tackle climate change, and meet other key development objectives. The challenges presented by this potential inability call for an ambitious policy response at the natio...
The Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated the tension between large development needs in infrastructure and scarce public resources. To alleviate this tension and promote a strong and job-rich recovery from the crisis, Africa needs to mobilize more financing from and to the private sector.
As countries strive for a strong recovery and to recoup the losses incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, they need to map out a new path for development and high and sustained growth. Promoting diversification, developing new industrial capabilities, and designing the policies needed to achieve this goal should be a priority. A successful diversification strategy should tackle both broad policy failures, such as an unfavorable business environment and investment climate and sector-specific market failures. This departmental paper presents a conceptual framework to analyze industrial policy, defined as targeted sectoral interventions. The authors first discuss the key principles that should guide policymakers, that is, a focus on the market failures that could justify targeted sectoral interventions, as well as the potential government failures that can undermine these interventions. The authors then discuss some commonly employed policy tools, their rationale, and the associated pitfalls. Finally, the authors outline a stylized decision-making framework.
This technical note and manual (TNM) addresses the following issues: • Evaluating the full implications from the policies adopted to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy requires a well-developed macroeconomic framework. This note illustrates how such frameworks were used to analyze Colombia and Cambodia's shock impact at the beginning of the pandemic. • The use of macroeconomic frameworks is not to infer general policy conclusions from abstract models or empirical analysis but to help policymakers think through and articulate coherent forecasts, scenarios, and policy responses. • The two country cases illustrate how to construct a baseline scenario consistent with a COVID-19 shock within structural macroeconomic models. The scenario is built gradually to incorporate the available information, the pandemic's full effects, and the policy responses. • The results demonstrate the value of combining close attention to the data, near-term forecasting, and model-based analyses to support coherent policies.
Global Economic Prospects is a World Bank Group Flagship Report that examines global economic developments and prospects, with a special focus on emerging market and developing economies, on a semiannual basis (in January and June). Each edition includes analytical pieces on topical policy challenges faced by these economies.
China and Africa have forged a strong economic relationship since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. This paper examines the evolution of these economic ties starting in the early 2000s, and the subsequent shift in the relationship triggered by the commodity price collapse in 2015 and by the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential effects on the African continent of a further slowdown in Chinese growth are analyzed, highlighting the varying effects on different countries in Africa, especially those heavily dependent on their economic relationship with China. The conclusion offers a discussion of ways how African countries and China could adapt to the changing relationship.
Large price changes in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have caused erratic fluctuations in the U.S. headline inflation rate. This paper compares alternative approaches to filtering out the transitory effects of these industry price changes and measuring the underlying or core level of inflation over 2020-2021. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of core, the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices (XFE), has performed poorly: over most of 2020-21, it is almost as volatile as headline inflation. Measures of core that exclude a fixed set of additional industries, such as the Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price inflation rate, have been less volatile, but the least volatile have been measures that filter out large price changes in any industry, such as the Cleveland Fed’s median inflation rate and the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean inflation rate. These core measures have followed smooth paths, drifting down when the economy was weak in 2020 and then rising as the economy has rebounded. Overall, we find that the case for the Federal Reserve to move away from the traditional XFE measure of core has strengthened during 2020-21.
This paper studies the dynamics of external accounts during 278 economic recession events in the past 60 years and sheds light on key factors that shape these patterns. Economic recessions trigger highly-persistent increases in the current account, driven by an initial, sharp decline in investment and fueled by medium term deleveraging, more so in advanced economies than in emerging markets. The strengthening of the current account is more pronounced when internal and external imbalances are present, and less when recessions are synchronized across countries. During severe natural disasters or epidemics, however, current accounts tend to weaken in the short term. Consistent with these findings, the COVID-19 shock, with comparatively moderate pre-existing imbalances yet high synchronization, had a muted effect on current account balances. The compositional changes, however, were unique and driven by unprecedented policy intervention, with record public dissaving more than offsetting exceptional private saving.