We leverage survey data from emerging and developing Asia to highlight different aspects of household vulnerability to income shocks arising from the Covid-19 pandemic: occupation in Cambodia, self-insurance mechanisms in Nepal, and financial leverage in Vietnam. Occupation and ex-ante income...

This paper examines the role increasing personal wealth and home equity withdrawal (HEW) have had in the decline in the personal saving rate in the United States. It does so by comparing the U.S. experience with those of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Mortgage market liberalization...

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with the implementation of 1993 SNAand the updating of the national accounts' base year. It also makes a preliminary assessment of the possible estimation biases in nominal GDP estimates stemming from the use of outdated national accounts base...

The Korean authorities having taken decisive and proactive fiscal measures to help stem the fallout from the current global economic and financial crisis, with the size of the fiscal stimulus well-above the average response of other G20 economies. In this context, a key question is how effective...

This paper shows that increasing government social expenditures can make a substantive contribution to increasing household consumption in China. The paper first undertakes an empirical study of the relationship between the savings rate and social expenditures for a panel of OECD countries and...

Household savings rates in the United States have recently crept up from all-time lows. Some have suggested that a shift toward frugality will hamper GDP growth-the Keynesian "paradox of thrift." We estimate that households compensate for a fall in their asset income by saving more out of their...

From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to ¼ of disposable income. We use household-level data to explain the postponing of consumption despite rapid income growth. Tracing cohorts over time indicates virtually no consumption smoothing...

It is generally acknowledged that the government's output is difficult to define and its value is hard to measure. The practical solution, adopted by national accounts systems, is to equate output to input costs. However, several studies estimate significant inefficiencies in government...