The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented collapse in global economic activity and trade. The crisis has also highlighted the role played by global value chains (GVC), with countries facing shortages of components vital to everything from health systems to everyday household goods....

In this paper we propose a novel approach to obtain the predictive density of global GDP growth. It hinges upon a bottom-up probabilistic model that estimates and combines single countries' predictive GDP growth densities, taking into account cross-country interdependencies. Specifically,we...

Digitalization and the innovative use of digital technologies is changing the way we work, learn, communicate, buy and sell products. One emerging digital technology of growing importance is cloud computing. More and more businesses, governments and households are purchasing hardware and...

Korea's rapid growth has slowed in recent years, suggesting lower potential growth. This paper uses an array of techniques, including statistical filters, a multivariate model and the production function, to estimate Korea's potential growth. The main finding is that trend growth has fallen from...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represent a new global consensus to end poverty, promote prosperity, and protect the environment. Goal 8 seeks to improve global resource efficiency in consumption and production and to decouple economic growth...

Consumer price indexes (CPIs) are compiled at the higher (weighted) level using Laspeyres-type arithmetic averages. This paper questions the suitability of such formulas and considers two counterpart alternatives that use geometric averaging, the Geometric Young and the (price-updated) Geometric...

A key element in the build-up to the global recession and subsequently was the movement in house price indexes (HPIs). These indexes are particularly prone to methodological and coverage differences which can undermine both within-country and cross-country economic analysis. The paper outlines...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

To identify and quantify downside risks to housing markets, we apply the house price-at-risk methodology to a sample of 37 cities across the United States and Canada using quarterly data from 1983 to 2018. This paper finds that downside risks to housing markets in the United States have...

This paper applies state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to develop the first sentiment index measuring member countries' reception of IMF policy advice at the time of Article IV Consultations. This paper finds that while authorities of member countries largely agree with Fund advice, there...