The ongoing euro-area crisis is seen by many as vindication of skeptics who said that a monetary union encompassing a disparate group of countries is doomed to fail because the countries do not constitute what economists call an optimum currency area. Thus, they argued, a one-size-fits-all...

The cross-section distribution of U.S. import prices exhibits some of the fat-tailed characteristics that are well documented for the cross-section distribution of U.S. consumer prices. This suggests that limited-influence estimators of core import price inflation might outperform headline or...

China’s economic slowdown and changing demographics cloud its housing market’s long-term prospects. While urbanization and a lack of alternative investment opportunities provide short-run support, the housing sector’s difficulties imperil China’s financial sector and the global recovery.

Central bank independence has never been more important, ensuring that central bankers are able to deliver on their mandates.

More than half of the world’s adult population lacks access to formal financial services. The proportion is greater in developing countries, where 64 percent on average do not have bank accounts, compared with 17 percent in developed nations (Chart 1).[1] Mobile communications technology is...

Value-added trade data provide a needed complementary measure to conventional compilations to aid in the understanding of bilateral interdependence.

To get a more accurate picture of China’s economy, economists examine other measures of activity that closely track growth but are less prone to political interference than output data. Industrial electricity consumption, a major production input, serves as such a proxy.

Asian economies now appear better positioned to deal with adverse external financial shocks.