How Much Should You Save for Retirement?
By David Amaglobeli, Era Dabla-Norris, and Vitor Gaspar
عربي, 中文, Español, Français, 日本語, Português, Русский
How much you need to save for retirement depends on your country’s pension system. […]
Chart of the Week: A Golden Aging for Vietnam?
By IMFBlog
July 17, 2017
A worker in a silk factory in Dalat, Vietnam. Encouraging more women to join the workforce and shifting to higher productivity occupations will help the country overcome the impact of an aging population (photo: Gerhard Zwerger-Schoner/imageBroker/Newscom)
Vietnam’s demographic dividend is fast turning into a handicap.
For decades, working-age Vietnamese made up an expanding share of the population, boosting economic growth and helping to keep retirement and health spending in check. […]
Debt in a Time of Protests
As the world economy continues to struggle, people are taking to the streets by the thousands to protest painful cuts in public spending designed to reduce government debt and deficits. This fiscal fury is understandable. People want to regain the confidence they once had about the future when the economy was booming and more of us had jobs. But after a protracted economic crisis, this will take planning, fair burden-sharing, and time itself.
Top 20 — iMFdirect’s Top 20 list
The IMF blog has helped stimulate considerable debate about economic policy in the current crisis, on events in Europe and around the world, on fiscal adjustment, on regulating the financial sector, and the future of macroeconomics, as economists learn lessons from the Great Recession. As readers struggled to understand the implications of the crisis, our most popular post by far was IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard's Four Hard Truths, a look back at 2011 and the economic lessons for the future.
Tackling The Jobs Crisis: What’s To Be Done?
Faced with a jobs crisis, policymakers the world over are digging deep into their policy toolkits to generate more employment. A recent study by the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department argues that reforms of tax and expenditure policies offer great promise in helping countries confront the jobs crisis, including in the short term.
Beyond the Austerity Debate: the Deficit Bias in the post-Bretton Woods Era
The growth versus austerity debate is detracting attention from policy issues that may seem less urgent, but which are nevertheless critical in the medium term. I am referring to what I would call the institutional gaps in fiscal policymaking that still exist in most advanced and emerging economies. These gaps have contributed to a bias in the conduct of fiscal policy in favor of deficits that is behind many of the current problems.
How to Get the Balance Right: Fiscal Policy At a Time of Crisis
The crisis has harmed growth, increased unemployment, and left a large number of people less protected. We are now seeing some signs of stabilization. Most countries are reducing their deficits and even if debt ratios are still rising, the return back to fiscal health has begun.
Going Broke? Why Pension Reforms Are Needed in Emerging Economies
Many emerging economies will need to expand their pension systems to reduce poverty among the elderly. Well designed reforms can help countries meet this objective without going broke.
Disappearing Deficits
In our work at the IMF, we sometimes discover that governments choose to employ accounting devices—or stratagems that make the deficit smaller without actually causing any pain, and without actually improving public finances. In ideal accounting, this would not be possible. In real accounting, it sometimes is.