After earlier success, growth performance in most Caribbean countries has been disappointing since the early 1990s. With slower growth, output has fallen behind that of relevant comparator countries. This paper analyzes the growth experience of the Caribbean countries from a cross country...

This paper compiles and compares recent and past measures introduced to contain the public wage bill in a number of emerging and advanced economies to assess their effectiveness in bringing down expenditure in a sustained way. In the aftermath of the Great Recession a number of countries have...

After decades of high growth, the Chinese economy is facing headwinds from slowing productivity growth and a declining workforce that are projected to lower potential growth substantially in the longer term. We project China's potential growth over the medium to long term, showing that potential...

We study the determinants of new and repeated research collaborations, drawing on the co-authorship network of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s Working Papers series. Being an outlet where authors express their views on topics of interest, and given that IMF staff is not subject to the...

This paper inquires into how individual attitudes to climate issues and support for climate policies have evolved in the context of the pandemic. Using data from a unique survey of 14,500 individuals across 16 major economies, this study shows that the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic...

The COVID-19 pandemic altered consumption patterns significantly in a short period of time. However, official inflation statistics take time to reflect these changes in the weights of the CPI consumption basket. Using credit card data for the UK and Germany, we document how consumption patterns...

How often have wage-price spirals occurred, and what has happened in their aftermath? We investigate this by creating a database of past wage-price spirals among a wide set of advanced economies going back to the 1960s. We define a wage-price spiral as an episode where at least three out of four...

The monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area has been adversely affected by the recent crises. Using survey data on thousands of euro area firms, we study factors that affect the access to finance of SMEs. We find that changes in bank funding costs and borrower leverage matter for...

The multipliers of taxes, and government consumption and investment expenditure for the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) are estimated using vector autoregression models with panel data. The impact and long-run multipliers are below unity, suggesting that a great extent of the intended...

The study presents an analysis of the information content of IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) indicators. There are significant differences in the quantity of information between DQAF dimensions and sub-dimensions. The most informative DQAF dimension is accessibility,...