Policymakers in the EU member states are currently shaping rescue packages to prevent the financial crisis hitting their economies with unmitigated force. Each government is responding to the emerging problems with a country-specific set of measures. Given the global nature of the crisis, would...

With disparities in national unemployment rates reaching record levels, the debate on fiscal stabilisers in Europe has gained new momentum. Can a European unemployment insurance scheme help to absorb asymmetric shocks and bring about the desired level of macroeconomic stabilisation? What should...

We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...

This paper uses a global input-output framework to quantify US and EU demand spillovers and the elasticity of world trade to GDP during the global recession of 2008-2009. We find that 20-30 percent of the decline in the US and EU demand was borne by foreign countries, with NAFTA, Emerging...

We estimate world cycles using a new quarterly dataset of output, credit and asset prices assembled using IMF archives and covering a large set of advanced and emerging economies since 1950. World cycles, both real and financial, exist and are generally driven by US shocks. But their impact is...

This paper uses two of the IMF's structural macroeconomic models to estimate the potential global impact of the boom in unconventional oil and natural gas in the United States. The results suggest that the impact on the level of U.S. real GDP over roughly the next decade could be significant,...