Pacific island countries are highly vulnerable to various natural disasters which are destructive, unpredictable and occur frequently. The frequency and scale of these shocks heightens the importance of medium-term economic and fiscal planning to minimize the adverse impact of disasters on...

India's financial sector is not deeply integrated with the global financial system, which spared it the first round adverse effects of the global financial crisis and left Indian banks mostly unaffected. However, as the financial crisis morphed in to a full-blown global economic downturn, India...

With the revival of global economy, the issues of "exit policies" and rebalancing global growth have taken center stage in policy discussions. Since many emerging Asian economies presently have large current account surpluses, the issue of rebalancing has special significance for Asia. While...

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...

Is there a one-size-fits-all approach to inclusive growth? We look at four key case studies across advanced and emerging markets-the Nordics, India, Brazil, and Egypt-to try to answer this question. We highlight qualitatively in these countries the key components of inclusive growth models,...

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 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...

This paper explores the macroeconomic impact of social unrest, using a novel index based on news reports. The findings are threefold. First, unrest has an adverse effect on economic activity, with GDP remaining on average 0.2 percentage points below the pre-shock baseline six quarters after a...

Covid-19 has exacerbated economic and social vulnerabilities across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). There is a risk that growth could be lower for longer, with a setback to development. Post-pandemic reforms thus become even more important, especially with constrained scope for fiscal and monetary...