Iraq is facing daunting challenges of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) insurgency, political upheaval, and profound economic and humanitarian crises. Compounding the ISIS-related crisis, the sharp decline in global oil prices has resulted in significant decline in oil export revenues....

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world economy upside down. As recently as January 2020, analysts and various institutions projected that, this year, the global economy would haverecovered from the lowest growth since post-global financial crisis. But instead, developed and developing...

Before the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, Somalia's economy was on an upward trajectory, recovering from the 2016/17 drought. The economy grew at an estimated rate of 2.9 percent in 2019, on par with population growth, and was projected to grow at 3.2 percent in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has...

Tajikistan is one of the world's most remittance-dependent economies, receiving net remittance inflows equivalent to approximately 40 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Falling remittance inflows was one of the main transmission channels through which the 2008-09 global economic crisis...

As governments around the world struggle to piece together the most effective fiscal response to counter the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, some are facing constraints imposed by fiscal rules enacted in the past to ensure fiscal discipline. The outbreak has revealedthe...

The global financial crisis severely affected economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA). Currencies depreciated across the region. Government tax revenues declined sharply leading to high budget deficits and rising levels of public debt. Tightening credit supply and deteriorating...

The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global gross domestic product contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global...

This paper studies periods of prolonged contractions in output per capita in a sample of 145 countries from 1950 to 2014. Economic slumps are defined as abrupt interruptions of a period of growth by several regime switches. Slumps start with a sharp contraction along with a trend break, which is...

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

This paper examines the impact of the recent recession in Belarus on poverty and broader measures of household welfare and compares the recent recession episode to previous economic crises in Belarus. The paper constructs a measure of vulnerability to poverty, based on an estimated probability...