The oil price decline creates an opportunity to dismantle energy subsidies, which escalatedwith high oil prices. This paper assesses energy subsidies in Latin America and theCaribbean-about 1.8 percent of GDP in 2011-13 (approximately evenly split betweenfuel and electricity), and about 3.8...

Many countries have used energy subsidies to cushion the effects of high energy prices on households and firms. After documenting the transmission of oil supply shocks empirically in the United States and the Euro Area, we use a New Keynesian modeling framework to study the conditions under...

This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect supply and environmental costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by charging below efficient fuel prices. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion in 2022 or 7.1...

We use structural scenario analysis to show that the climate policy mix-supply-side versus demand-side policies-can lead to different oil price paths with diverging distributional consequences in a netzero emissions scenario. When emission reduction is driven by demand-side policies, prices...

This paper investigates the connection between climate change and energy security in Europe and provides empirical evidence that these issues are the two faces of the same coin. Using a panel of 39 countries in Europe over the period 1980-2019, the empirical analysis presented in this paper...

We estimate that the recent surge in international fossil fuel prices will raise European households' cost of living in 2022 by close to 7 percent of consumption on average. Household burdens vary significantly across and within countries, but in most cases they are regressive. Policymakers have...

The Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) for low-income countries (LICs) is a standardized analytical tool to monitor debt sustainability. This paper uses DSAs from three periods around the time of the global economic crisis to analyze the projected trajectories of debt ratios for a sample of...

The degree of an economy's monetization, which has an important implication on economic growth, can be affected by the conduct of monetary policy, financial sector reform, and episodes of financial crises. The paper finds that monetization--measured by the ratio of broad money to nominal GDP--...

We develop a model to study the macroeconomic effects of public investment surges in low-income countries, making explicit: (i) the investment-growth linkages; (ii) public external and domestic debt accumulation; (iii) the fiscal policy reactions necessary to ensure debt-sustainability; and (iv)...

We analyze factors driving persistently higher financial intermediation costs in low-income countries (LICs) relative to emerging market (EMs) country comparators. Using the net interest margin as a proxy for financial intermediation costs at the bank level, we find that within LICs a...