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El Salvador
This Selected Issues paper proposes a simple nowcast model for an early assessment of the Salvadorian economy. The exercise is based on a bridge model, which is one of the many tools available for nowcasting. For El Salvador, the bridge model exploits information for the period 2005–17 from a large set of variables that are published earlier and at higher frequency than the variable of interest, in this case quarterly GDP. The estimated GDP growth rate in the 4th quarter of 2017 is 2.4 percent year-over-year, leading to an average GDP growth rate of 2.3 percent in 2017. This is in line with the GDP growth implied by the official statistics released two months later, in March 23, 2018.
Post-Covid-19 Recovery and Resilience: Leveraging Reforms for Growth and Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
Covid-19 has exacerbated economic and social vulnerabilities across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). There is a risk that growth could be lower for longer, with a setback to development. Post-pandemic reforms thus become even more important, especially with constrained scope for fiscal and monetary stimuli. Reforms could boost per capita growth by an additional 0.3-1.3 percentage points, relative to the 1.9 percent average since 2010. Such growth would reduce per capita income doubling time from 37 years to about 22 years. Low-income countries stand to gain the most from reforms. The largest gains come from governance, products markets, and factor accumulation. Importantly, these reforms can be implemented in the post-pandemic environment characterized by weaker social and distributional outcomes.
Dominican Republic
Supported by sound policies and positive spillovers, the Dominican Republic has staged an impressive recovery from the pandemic, cementing its place as one of the most dynamic and resilient economies in the Western Hemisphere. The strong recovery began moderating at the end of 2022 in response to tighter global financial conditions, lower global demand, and policy accommodation withdrawal, helping ease inflationary pressures. The current account deficit widened in 2022 to 5.6 percent of GDP and was mostly financed by Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows, with the country maintaining sound market access. The financial sector appears well-capitalized, liquid, and profitable.
Industrial Policy and State Ownership
Using a novel data set with bank-sector-level annual loan data from 137 commercial banks in China from 2004 to 2021 and a quantified industrial policy data set based on text analysis, this paper explores the effects of industrial policy on bank credit provision. While the paper finds no conclusive evidence that commercial banks allocate, on average, more credit to sectors promoted by the central government, it does find heterogenous sensitivities of banks to industrial policy. Rural commercial banks tend to respond most positively to industrial policy compared to other commercial banks. Banks that have lower asset quality, are smaller, have a higher liquidity ratio, and are not listed are more responsive to industrial policy. In addition, sectors dominated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) benefit more when there is an industrial policy announcement, while policies in SOE-dominated sectors will crowd out credit to other sectors, because SOEs are less risky, both economically and politically. Therefore, banks face a trade-off between political pressure and profitability in response to industrial policy, leading to distortions of financial resource allocation in favor of SOEs.
Key Challenges Faced by Fossil Fuel Exporters During the Energy Transition
The global energy transition is affecting fossil fuel exporters from multiple angles. It is adding to longstanding uncertainties on relative movements of fossil fuel demand and supply—which impact fossil fuel-related exports, fiscal flows, investment and subsequently external and fiscal accounts, economic growth, and employment. While policymakers are very familiar with these challenges, they now also face expectations of a permanent decline in the long-run global demand for fossil fuels. Key factors that could determine country-level impacts include (i) the type of fossil fuel a country exports (ii) extraction costs and (iii) country characteristics. The monitoring and mitigation of fisca...
Proximity and Horizontal Policies: The Backbone of Export Diversification
The lack of a clear link between general economic fundamentals and export diversification indicators in the literature has fueled the believe that industrial policies are an absolute requisite to diversify exports. This paper, however, does find a strong statistical connection between horizontal policies and diversification by making two novel changes to traditional methodologies: using export categories that lead to diversification (for example, manufactures) as dependent variables, and using a gravity-equation regression setting. Proximity to other economies explains about a third of cross-country heterogeneity in targeted exports, and four fifths together with horizontal policies. Australia, Chile, and New Zealand emerge as new role models for diversification policies.
United States
This Selected Issues paper for the United States discusses the microeconomics of the country—household wealth and savings. Households’ consumption-saving decisions have an important bearing on the U.S. economic outlook. This paper demonstrates how households with consistently lower income, which have shown growth in the years prior to the crisis, experienced larger declines in their saving rates and a larger rise in their indebtedness before the crisis, contributing significantly to the dynamics of the mean saving rate.
Regional Economic Outlook, Asia and Pacific, April 2024
Growth in Asia and the Pacific outperformed expectations in late 2023, reaching 5.0 percent for the year. Inflation has continued to decline, albeit at varying speeds: some economies are still seeing sustained price pressures, while others are facing deflationary risks. In 2024, growth is projected to slow modestly to 4.5 percent. Near-term risks are now broadly balanced, as global disinflation and the prospect of monetary easing have increased the likelihood of a soft landing. Spillovers from a deeper property sector correction in China remain an important risk, however, while geoeconomic fragmentation clouds medium-term prospects. Given the diverse inflation landscape, central bank policies need to calibrate policies carefully to domestic needs. Fiscal consolidation should accelerate to contain debt burdens and debt service cost, in order to preserve budgetary space for addressing structural challenges, including population aging and climate change.
Trade and Income in the Long Run: Are There Really Gains, and Are They Widely Shared?
In the cross section of countries, there is a strong positive correlation between trade and income, and a negative relationship between trade and inequality. Does this reflect a causal relationship? We adopt the Frankel and Romer (1999) identification strategy, and exploit countries' exogenous geographic characteristics to estimate the causal effect of trade on income and inequality. Our cross-country estimates for trade's impact on real income are consistently positive and significant over time. At the same time, we do not find any statistical evidence that more trade increases aggregate measures of income inequality. Heeding previous concerns in the literature (e.g. Rodriguez and Rodrik, 2001; Rodrik, Subramanian and Trebbi, 2004), we carefully analyze the validity of our geography-based instrument, and confirm that the IV estimates for the impact of trade are not driven by other direct or indirect effects of geography through non-trade channels.
