The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the...

This paper elaborates on a number of key principles that need to underpin a coherent and development-friendly architecture for the WTO. The key principles include enlarging the scope of WTO bargaining to include labor flows as well as capital flows; creating a structure that would provide a...

The paper characterizes the feasibility of economic transformation as requiring the simultaneous attainment of macroeconomic stability, political support, and adequate private investment. Macroeconomic stability is defined as fiscal balance; political feasibility is related to the income gains and...

We develop a model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of a scaling-up of aid and assess the implications of different policy responses. The model features key structural characteristics of low-income countries, including varying degrees of public investment efficiency and a learning-by-doing...

This paper examines publicly listed Chilean firms’ performance during the 2008–09 crisis. In particular, it studies the effects from changes in external financing conditions, aggregate demand, and international trade on firms’ investment, sales, and profits, using...

Abstract: Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles...

The constraints that external linkages impose on domestic policy choices in Saudi Arabia have continuously evolved over the past four decades. This paper argues that two major ongoing developments in particular have affected and will continue to affect policy trade-offs. First, growing oil needs...

We employ a set of sign restrictions on the generalized impulse responses of a Global VAR model, estimated for 38 countries/regions over the period 1979Q2–2011Q2, to discriminate between supply-driven and demand-driven oil-price shocks and to study the time profile of their macroeconomic...

This paper develops a new monthly World Trade Leading Indicator (WTLI) that relies on nonparametric and parametric approaches. Compared to the CPB World Trade Monitor’s benchmark indicator for global trade the WTLI captures turning points in global trade with an average lead between 2 and...

This paper develops a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy, disaggregated into thirty five national economies. This panel unobserved components model encompasses an approximate linear panel dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring a monetary transmission...