Competition is a core element of economic growth, but empirical evidence on how competition affects productivity is often limited. Competition and Productivity Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean presents new empirical research that shows how competition policy in the region has...

Analyzing the macroeconomic consequences of a transition to a net-zero economy creates specific modeling challenges, including those related to the non-marginal nature of the required transformation, the role of technologies, and the replacement of fossil fuel-based assets with greener ones. To...

Fiscal buffers have shrunk across the world. This paper argues that limited fiscal room in emerging market economies today is partly due to the commodity super cycle of 2000-15. The super cycle created the mirage that economic performance had structurally improved, mistaking a long,...

This paper summarizes the World Bank's approach to identifying parameters for key equations in its macro structural model for countries where short sample sizes or major structural changes render traditional time-series approaches infeasible or yield unstable estimates. To identify parameters...

This paper outlines the structure and economic foundation of the World Bank's macroeconomic and fiscal model (MFMod). MFMod consists of individual country models for 181 countries. The models are used by country economists within the World Bank's Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global...

Policy toward fiscal rules is an important issue in the countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia). According to a rough estimate, the countries with rules (all but North Macedonia) have complied with their debt and...

Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and...

This paper develops a bottom-up, sector-specific approach to modeling potential output that overcomes limitations of traditional top-down estimates for long-term projections and policy analysis. The model disaggregates total-factor productivity (TFP) growth into within-sector productivity...

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has made slow but consistent progress addressing the imbalances induced by the pandemic in an international environment that is just now showing signs of stabilizing. Despite favorable macroeconomic management, high interest rates and fiscal imbalances...

This paper proposes a leading indicator, the "Google Mobility Index," for nowcasting monthly industrial production growth rates in selected economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. The index is constructed using the Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Report database via a Kalman filter. The...