The COVID-19 pandemic is imposing economic and broader development challenges as never before. Policy lessons from Asia and the Pacific's past experience in dealing with shocks show that focusing on economic growth alone is not enough. Rising inequality and environmental challenges increased the...

The novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, has brought significant change to people's lives and business activities nationally, regionally, and globally. The Philippines took swift action-including enhanced community quarantine (ECQ)-to contain the pandemic and launched an emergency subsidy...

While the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all countries, output losses vary considerably across countries. We provide a first analysis of robust determinants of the observed initial output losses using model-averaging techniques-Weighted Average Least Squares and Bayesian Model Averaging. The...

During decades of market development, the individual financial markets of the member economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been progressively incorporated into regional and international markets. The aim of this study is to explore and measure the strength and...

This study empirically investigated the factors affecting firms' ability to adjust production in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This study used firm-level survey data from the Enterprise Survey implemented by the World Bank Group, including a standard Enterprise Survey (Baseline) and two...

The impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak have heavily affected CAREC member countries, which include Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Pakistan, the People's Republic of China (PRC), Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The COVID-19 crisis and the...

Digital technology has rapidly transformed the PRC's economy over the past decade, especially in areas of e-commerce and digital finance. In many ways, digital technology changes the pattern of economic operation, as it enlarges business scale, increases economic efficiency, improves user...

This paper summarizes unprecedented adverse health and economic impacts as well as policy responses in the Asia and Pacific region and the rest of the world generated by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020. By the end of 2020, over 80 million people had been infected, with...

This paper studies the evolution of the natural interest rate in five Southeast Asian countries and considers the effect of economic shocks on the natural interest rate in these countries. The natural interest rate is the interest rate that would prevail in an economy in equilibrium and in the...

This paper updates the analysis of the global macroeconomic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in earlier papers by the authors with data as of late October 2020. It also extends the focus to Asian economies and explores four alternative policy interventions that are coordinated across all...