John. J. McCloy, President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, discussed the U.S. announcement of the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan). This ambitious plan must be economically successful. The inherent strengths of Europe give reasonable assurance of the...

The note describes the key challenges facing the health, livelihoods, and mobility of internal and international migrants and their families due to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. The note presents the policy options available to governments to address these challenges and describes the...

As governments around the world struggle to piece together the most effective fiscal response to counter the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, some are facing constraints imposed by fiscal rules enacted in the past to ensure fiscal discipline. The outbreak has revealedthe...

The global financial crisis severely affected economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA). Currencies depreciated across the region. Government tax revenues declined sharply leading to high budget deficits and rising levels of public debt. Tightening credit supply and deteriorating...

In the last decade, over half of the EU countries in the euro area or with currencies pegged to the euro were hit by large risk premium shocks. Previous papers have focused on the impact of these shocks on demand. This paper, by contrast, focuses on the impact on supply. We show that risk...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

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...

The financial crisis, originated from the collapse of US housing markets in 2008, reverberates around the world. Its destructive force was felt nowhere more keenly than Western Europe. Indeed, it continues to mire in financial volatility as the debt problem contagiously spreads around the...

Why did the Great Recession lead to such a slow recovery? I build a model where heterogeneous firms invest in physical and intangible capital, and can default on their debt. In case of default, intangible assets are harder to seize by creditors. Hence, intangible capital faces higher financing...