With fiscal adjustment proceeding quickly in Bulgaria and given the weak economic growth environment, there is keen interest in making the budget composition more growth friendly. This paper quantifies the short-term impact of fiscal policy on economic activity in Bulgaria using econometric and...

After many years of rapid expansion, China's growth is slowing to more sustainable levels and is rebalancing, with consumption becoming the main growth driver. This transition is likely to have negative effects on its trading partners in the near term. This paper studies the potential spillovers...

We explore two issues triggered by the crisis. First, in most advanced countries, output remains far below the pre-recession trend, suggesting hysteresis. Second, while inflation has decreased, it has decreased less than anticipated, suggesting a breakdown of the relation between inflation and...

In the last few decades, real GDP growth and investment in advanced countries have declined in tandem. This slowdown was not the result of weak demand (there has been no shift along the Okun curve), but of a decline in potential output growth (which has shifted the Okun curve to the left). We...

Output gap estimates are subject to a wide range of uncertainty owing to data revisions and the difficulty in distinguishing between cycle and trend in real time. This is important given the central role in monetary policy of assessments of economic activity relative to capacity. We show that...

While some credit booms are followed by economic underperformance, many are not. Canlending standards help separate good credit booms from bad credit booms contemporaneously?To observe lending standards internationally, I use information from primary debt capitalmarkets. I construct the...

All types of recessions, on average, not just those associated with financial and political crises (as in Cerra and Saxena, AER 2008), lead to permanent output losses. These findings have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. A new paradigm of the business cycle needs to account for...

The Lao economy is estimated to have expanded by around 7 percent in 2015, a slight moderation from 7.5 percent in 2014. Similar to the last decade, the resource sectors (hydropower and extractives) continued to make an important contribution to growth. Power generation got a boost from the...

The country benefited from the improved external demand in 2017. Global growth is estimated to have picked up in 2017 to 3.0 percent from 2.4 percent in 2016, reflecting gradual recovery in the euro area, China, emerging Europe, and Russia as commodity prices and financial markets continued to...

The Iran Economic Monitor provides an update on key economic developments and policies over the past six months. It examines these economic developments and policies in a longer-term and global context, and assesses their implications for the outlook for the country. Its coverage has ranged from...