IMFBlog2020-02-19T15:04:00-05:00February 18, 2020|
By Stefania Fabrizio, Daniel Gurara and Lisa Kolovich
Making sure that opportunities to enter the workforce are fair and rewarding for women benefits everyone. Yet, the average female workforce participation rate across countries is still 20 percentage points lower than the male rate, largely because gender gaps in wages and access to opportunities, such as education, stubbornly persist. […]
IMFBlog2019-10-11T09:33:18-04:00October 10, 2019|
By Vitor Gaspar, Paolo Mauro, Ian Parry, and Catherine Pattillo
عربي, 中文, Español, Français, 日本語, Português, Русский
Global warming has become a clear and present threat. Actions and commitments to date have fallen short. […]
IMFBlog2019-09-09T08:45:51-04:00September 4, 2019|
By William Oman
July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded on earth, with countries across the world experiencing record-breaking temperatures. […]
IMFBlog2019-07-23T10:05:55-04:00July 23, 2019|
IMFBlog2019-07-18T09:25:47-04:00July 17, 2019|
IMFBlog2019-03-26T15:45:17-04:00October 5, 2016|
By Vitor Gaspar and Marialuz Moreno Badia
Versions in: عربي (Arabic), 中文 (Chinese), Français (French), 日本語 (Japanese), Русский (Russian), and Español (Spanish)
In the midst of the Great Depression, the American economist Irving Fisher warned of the dangers of excessive debt and the deflationary pressures that follow on its tail. He saw debt and deflation as the big, bad actors. Now, their close relatives—too high debt and too low inflation—are still in play, at least for advanced economies.
IMFBlog2019-03-27T15:27:24-04:00August 12, 2015|
By Francesco Grigoli, Alexander Herman, Andrew Swiston, and Gabriel Di Bella
(Version in Español and Português)
In the wake of the global financial crisis, monetary and fiscal policies were used aggressively to counteract the effects of the crisis on economic activity. Policymakers look at a number of indicators to guide them in assessing an economy’s level of activity relative to its productive capacity. But trying to figure out the position of the economy in real time is often quite challenging, with consequences for setting policy.
In the case of Brazil in 2011, for example, policymakers estimated in real time that the economy was at a level of output consistent with its productive capacity. Over time, however, the assessment of the cyclical position of the Brazilian economy changed drastically. It had not just been at full capacity, but was overheating. The economy was actually facing inflationary pressures, requiring policy tightening to bring it back to the central bank’s target.
IMFBlog2019-03-27T16:18:34-04:00June 4, 2015|
IMF staff have just concluded their annual health check of the U.S. economy, and released their concluding statement.
This year we have also undertaken a Financial Sector Assessment Program with the United States. We conduct these once every 5 years for systemically important countries and it is a comprehensive exercise looking at the whole U.S. financial system.
Given this important work, we have focused our review of the U.S. economy on financial stability risks and the appropriate policies to mitigate them, as well as looking at recent movements in the U.S. dollar and the timing, form, and impact of interest rate normalization by the Fed.
A more detailed report on the U.S. economy and on the financial sector will be available on July 8.
IMFBlog2019-03-27T16:21:15-04:00June 2, 2015|
By Jonathan D. Ostry and Atish R. Ghosh
Financial bailouts, stimulus spending, and lower revenues during the Great Recession have resulted in some of the highest public debt ratios seen in advanced economies in the past forty years. Recent debates have centered on the pace at which to pay down this debt, with few questions being asked about whether the debt needs to be paid down in the first place.
A radical solution for high debt is to do nothing at all—just live with it. Indeed, from a welfare economics perspective—abstracting from real world problems such as rollover risk—this would be optimal. We explore this issue in our recent work. While there are some countries where clearly debt needs to be brought down, there are others that are in a more comfortable position to fund themselves at exceptionally low interest rates, and that could indeed simply live with their debt (allowing their debt ratio to decline through growth or windfall revenues).
IMFBlog2019-03-27T17:02:44-04:00May 29, 2015|
By Petya Koeva Brooks and Gerd Schwartz
The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath have tested the European Union’s (EU) fiscal governance framework—the rules, regulations, and procedures that influence how budgetary policy is planned, approved, carried out, and monitored. Given the distinctive nature of EU integration, the framework aims to discipline national fiscal policies to prevent adverse spillovers to other countries and distortions to the conduct of the euro area’s common monetary policy.
The build-up of fiscal imbalances, however, revealed gaps in the framework. Public debt in the European Union soared following the crisis in 2008 to an average of around 95 percent in 2014—almost 30 percentage points above its average pre-crisis level (Chart 1).
