Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel, oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the sources of the recent decline in prices, and examines its macroeconomic, financial and policy implications. The recent drop...

Recent energy and food price surges, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have exacerbated inflation pressuresthat are unusually high by the standards of the past two decades. High and rising inflation has prompted many emerging market and developing economy (EMDE) central banks and some...

This paper presents a comprehensive cross-country database of fiscal space, broadly defined as the availability of budgetary resources for a government to service its financial obligations. The database covers up to 200 countries over the period 1990-2016, and includes 28 indicators of fiscal...

This paper presents a comprehensive cross-country database of fiscal space, broadly defined as the availability of budgetary resources for a government to service its financial obligations. The database covers up to 200 countries over the period 1990-2016, and includes 28 indicators of fiscal...

We analyze the evolution and drivers of inflation during the pandemic and the likely trajectory of inflation in the near-term using an event study of inflation around global recessions and a factor-augmented vector auto-regression (FAVAR) model. We report three main results. First, the decline...

This paper examines the global drivers of inflation in 55 countries over the 1970-2022 period. We estimate a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression model for each country and assess the importance of several global (demand, supply, and oil price) and domestic shocks. We report three main...