IMFBlog2021-07-16T10:15:26-04:00July 15, 2021|
By Estelle Xue Liu, Karim Foda, and Sebastian Weber
One of the positive surprises about last year’s recession is how little damage it inflicted on average household and corporate balance sheets in Europe. […]
IMFBlog2020-05-20T09:00:06-04:00May 20, 2020|
By Bryn Battersby, W. Raphael Lam, and Elif Ture
Governments have put forward swift and significant emergency lifelines to protect people in response to the pandemic. […]
IMFBlog2019-08-21T14:07:25-04:00May 28, 2019|
IMFBlog2019-03-14T13:18:44-04:00April 2, 2018|
By IMFBlog
April 2, 2018
Version in baˈhasa indoneˈsia (Indonesian)
Four students walk past a bank in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Policies like improving the quality of education can help the country increase the number of women in the workforce (photo: John Mulligan/iStock by Getty Images).
Malaysia, a country well on its way to achieving high income status, can increase the number of women in the labor force by implementing key labor market reforms. And the country should, because our research shows that more women in the workforce benefits the economy. […]
IMFBlog2017-04-14T01:48:56-04:00January 12, 2015|
By iMFdirect
In the end, the case for job rich, inclusive growth is not economic, it’s political, according to Nobel prize-winning economist Michael Spence.
In this podcast with the IMF, Spence discusses the growing sense in many countries that it’s mostly the wealthy population who are reaping the benefits of economic development.
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IMFBlog2017-04-14T01:59:34-04:00June 4, 2014|
By Jesus Gonzalez-Garcia and Francesco Grigoli
(Version in Español)
Government ownership of banks is still common around the world, despite the large number of privatizations that took place over the past four decades as governments reduced their role in the economy. On average, state-owned banks hold 21 percent of the assets of the banking system worldwide. In Latin American and Caribbean countries, the public banks’ share is about 15 percent, with some of them showing very large shares, for instance, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Costa Rica are all over 40 percent (see Figure 1).
State-owned banks play an important role in the financial system. They fulfill functions that are not performed by private banks, provide financing for projects that benefit the rest of the economy, and provide countercyclical lending (lending more when the economy is weak). But public banks usually respond to the needs of governments owing to the state’s obvious involvement in their administration. As a result, government’s participation in the banking system may weaken fiscal discipline by allowing the public sector to access financing that they would not obtain from other sources.
In our recent study, we use a panel dataset for 123 […]
IMFBlog2017-04-15T14:04:43-04:00July 19, 2012|
