A growing literature estimates the macroeconomic effect of weather using variations in annual country-level averages of temperature and precipitation. However, averages may not reveal the effects of extreme events that occur at a higher time frequency or higher spatial resolution. To address...

This Staff Climate Note is part of a series of three Notes (IMF Staff Climate Note 2022/001, 2022/002, and 2022/003) that discuss fiscal policies for climate change adaptation. A first Note (Bellon and Massetti 2022, henceforth Note 1) examines the economic principles that can guide the...

Adaptation to climate change is an integral part of sustainable development and a necessity for advanced and developing economies alike. How can adaptation be planned for and mainstreamed into fiscal policy? Setting up inclusive coordination mechanisms and strengthening legal foundations to...

Adaptation to climate change is a necessity for advanced and developing economies alike. Policymakers face the challenge of facilitating this transition. This Note argues that adaptation to climate change should be part of a holistic development strategy involving both private and public sector...

Automation technologies displace human labor from various production processes, but they also reinstate labor by creating new tasks. These perpetual developments create changes in the task content performed by human labor. (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2019) provide a methodology to measure these...

We investigate the substantial variation in the extent to which a rise in value-added tax (VAT) is passed on to consumers. We first extend existing theory to characterize the roles of imperfect competition and product differentiation, then investigate these relationships empirically using a...

Economic volatility remains a fact of life in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Household-level shocks create large consumption fluctuations, raising the incidence of poverty. Drawing on micro-level data from South Africa and Tanzania, we examine the vulnerability to shocks across household types (e.g....

After close to two decades of strong economic activity, overall growth in sub-Saharan Africa decelerated markedly in 2015-16 as the largest economies experienced negative or flat growth. Regional growth started recovering in 2017, but the question remains of how trends in the economies stuck in...