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The paper looks into the puzzle of low household savings in three Southern European (SE3) countries – Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal. Building on the household saving drivers literature, we employ cross-country micro-level data and investigate the key saving patterns, examining their heterogeneity across households in SE3 countries relative to the EA average. The results confirm the prominent role of income, along with interest rate, inflation, fiscal balance, and debt in shaping household savings in SE3 countries. Quantile regressions employed to analyze saving behavior across the distribution of households suggest that households with lower savings tend to see their savings dip (or dissavings rise) more-than-proportionately with shocks to income, interest rate, inflation, and government balance. Our policy simulations across the distribution of households suggest that targeted rather than universal policy intervention could improve household savings, especially of the most vulnerable ones.
The outlook for Low-Income Countries (LICs) is gradually improving, but they face persistent macroeconomic vulnerabilities, including liquidity challenges due to high debt service. There is significant heterogeneity among LICs: the poorest and most fragile countries have faced deep scarring from the pandemic, while those with diversified economies and Frontier Markets are faring better. Achieving inclusive growth and building resilience are essential for LICs to converge with more advanced economies and meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Building resilience will also be critical in the context of a more shock-prone world. This requires both decisive domestic actions, including expanding and better targeting Social Safety Nets (SSNs), and substantial external support, including adequate financing, policy advice, capacity development and, where needed, debt relief. The Fund is further stepping up its support through targeted policy advice, capacity building, and financing.
This paper reviews Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) facilities and financing. It proposes a comprehensive package of lending policy reforms and financing measures that aims to bolster the Fund’s capacity to support Low-Income Countries (LICs) in addressing their balance of payment needs, while restoring the self-sustainability of the Trust. The Review proposes a long-term self-sustained annual PRGT lending envelope of SDR 2.7 billion, more than double the PRGT envelope before the Covid-19 pandemic, consistent with the expected demand for Fund’s concessional financial support in the years ahead. The paper also proposes to introduce a new interest rate mechanism to better reflect ...
Foodborne microorganisms play a pivotal role in mediating the tight relation between food and human health from a dual perspective. In fact, notwithstanding the introduction of strict regulations and new technologies to ensure food quality and safety, foodborne pathogens continue to cause infections and diseases and represent a serious public health concern, while spoilage bacteria can severely affect food quality thus leading to major industry and commercial losses. On the other hand, probiotics positively affect human health, promoting digestion and uptake of dietary nutrients, strengthening intestinal barrier function, modulating immune response and enhancing antagonism towards pathogens....
Real GDP growth stalled at 3.8 percent in 2023, dampened by the deterioration of global economic prospects and the negative effect of electoral uncertainty on investment. After peaking in March 2023, inflationary pressures have eased. Led by a new presidential mandate, the authorities are requesting a cancellation of the current Extended Credit Facility (ECF) that ends in July 2024, and new ECF and Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF) arrangements. Cumulative disbursements under the current ECF reached SDR 171.08 million (70 percent of quota, about 78 percent of the total approved amount).
We provide evidence of a new channel through which exchange rates affect trade. Using a novel identification strategy that exploits firms’ maturity structure of foreign currency debt around a large depreciation in Colombia, we show that firms experiencing a stronger debt revaluation of dominant currency debt due to a home currency depreciation compress imports relatively more while exports are unaffected. Dominant currency financing does not lead to an import compression for firms that export, hold foreign currency assets, or are active in the foreign exchange derivatives markets, as they are all hedged against a revaluation of their debt. These findings can be rationalized through the prism of a model with costly state verification and foreign currency borrowing. Quantitatively, the dominant currency financing channel explains a significant part of the external adjustment process in addition to the expenditure switching channel. Pricing exports in the dominant currency, instead of the producer’s currency, mutes the effect of dominant currency financing on trade flows.
The four-volume set LNCS 11256, 11257, 11258, and 11259 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, PRCV 2018, held in Guangzhou, China, in November 2018. The 179 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 399 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Part I: Biometrics, Computer Vision Application. Part II: Deep Learning. Part III: Document Analysis, Face Recognition and Analysis, Feature Extraction and Selection, Machine Learning. Part IV: Object Detection and Tracking, Performance Evaluation and Database, Remote Sensing.
Analyzing organic pollutants in food, such as pesticides, pathogenic bacteria, and toxins is critical to ensuring global food security. Implementing reliable, effective, and rapid screening methods can ensure the accuracy of analytical results, improve the efficiency of analysis, and contribute to strengthening food safety supervision, thus promoting the sustainable development of the food system. In recent years, efficient sensing methods have attracted extensive attention, including colorimetry, fluorimetry, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, electrochemistry, and photoelectrochemistry. In addition, and more importantly, the rapidly emerging research field of nanotechnology to deploy nanomaterials provides exciting new possibilities for enhancing the performance of analytical methods (e.g., lower detection limit, wider detection linear range) in bioanalytical and biotechnological applications. Therefore, applying nanomaterials to sensing platforms is essential for efficient sensor development.
Reference book and statistical tables covering local government, trade, economic structure, public enterprises, private enterprises and government agencies in provincial China. Includes data on economic and social conditions (1978, 1979 and 1980), banks, research centres, occupational organizations, educational institutions, etc.