Corruption is macro-relevant for many countries, but is often hidden, making measurement of it-and its effects-inherently difficult. Existing indicators suffer from several weaknesses, including a lack of time variation due to the sticky nature of perception-based measures, reliance on a limited...

Vessel traffic data based on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a big data source for nowcasting trade activity in real time. Using Malta as a benchmark, we develop indicators of trade and maritime activity based on AIS-based port calls. We test the quality of these indicators by...

The consumer price index (CPI) is a key economic indicator used to gauge inflation, adjust wages, pensions, and social benefits. The producer prices index (PPI) is used for forecasting and deflating GDP estimates. Both indexes are used by the Fund, policymakers, and researchers for global,...

This paper assess how priorities of the IMF's membership have evolved over the past two decades, by using text mining techniques on a unique dataset combining IMFC communiques and constituency statements. Our results reveal significant variation in priorities across time and constituencies....

Direct measurement of corruption is difficult due to its hidden nature, and measuring the perceptions of corruption via survey-based methods is often used as an alternative. This paper constructs a new non-survey based perceptions index for 111 countries by applying sentiment analysis to...

We introduce unFEAR, Unsupervised Feature Extraction Clustering, to identify economic crisis regimes. Given labeled crisis and non-crisis episodes and the corresponding features values, unFEAR uses unsupervised representation learning and a novel mode contrastive autoencoder to group episodes...

This paper proposes an easy-to-follow approach to track merchandise trade using vessel data and applies it to Pacific island countries. Pacific islands rely heavily on imports and maritime transport for trade. They are also highly vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters that pose...

Promoting credit services to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) has been a perennial challenge for policy makers globally due to high information costs. Recent fintech developments may be able to mitigate this problem. By leveraging big data or digital footprints on existing platforms,...