We add to recent evidence on deindustrialization and document a new pattern: increasing industry polarization over time. We assess whether these new features of structural change can be explained by a dynamic open economy model with two primary driving forces, sector-biased productivity growth...

We study the importance of international trade in structural change. Our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks, and allows for non-unitary income and substitution elasticities. We calibrate our model to investigate South Korea's structural change between 1971 and 2005. We find...

Motivated by increasing trade and fragmentation of production across countries since World War II, we build a dynamic two-country model featuring sequential, multistage production and capital accumulation. As trade costs decline over time, globalvalue-chain (GVC) trade expands across countries,...

The shock of the pandemic and subsequent overlapping crises has led to a reversal in development by exacerbating the challenges facing the most vulnerable 75 economies eligible for concessional loans and grants from the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA). Over 2020-24, per...

We analyse cycles in policy interest rates in 24 advanced economies over 1970-2024, combining a new application of business cycle methodology with rich time-series decompositions of the shocks driving rate movements. "Rate cycles" have gradually evolved over time, with less frequent cyclical...

Conventional empirical models of monetary policy transmission in emerging market economies produce puzzling results: monetary tightening often leads to an increase in prices (the price puzzle) and depreciation of the currency (the FX puzzle). We show that incorporating forward-looking...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

Cross-border capital flows are expected to lead to increased international risk sharing by facilitating borrowing and lending in global financial markets. This paper examines risk-sharing outcomes of various types of capital flows (foreign direct investment, portfolio equity, debt, remittance,...

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...

Global inflation has risen sharply from its lows in mid-2020, on rebounding global demand, supply bottlenecks, and soaring food and energy prices, especially since the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine. Markets expect inflation to peak in mid-2022 and then decline, but to remain elevated...