public sector – IMF Blog

The Resilience of Private Balance Sheets in Europe during COVID-19

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. […]

Chart of the WeekTracking the $9 Trillion Global Fiscal Support to Fight COVID-19

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. […]

Chart of the WeekCorruption and Your Money

IMFBlog2019-08-21T14:07:25-04:00May 28, 2019|

By IMFBlog

Español, Português

The costs of corruption run deep. Your taxpayer dollars are lost in different ways, siphoned off from schools, roads, and hospitals to line the pockets of people up to no good. […]

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Chart of the Week: Malaysia Needs More Women in the Workforce

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 […]

Inclusive Growth=Stability

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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Banking on the Government

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 […]

Mind The Gap: Policies To Jump Start Growth in the U.K.

IMFBlog2017-04-15T14:04:43-04:00July 19, 2012|

The effects of a persistently weak economy and high long-term unemployment can reverberate through a country’s economy long into the future—commonly referred to by economists as hysteresis. Our analysis shows that the large and sustained output gap, the difference between what an economy could produce and what it is producing, raises the danger that a downturn reduces the economy’s productive capacity and permanently depresses potential GDP.