This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more...

This paper examines growth spillovers between emerging markets and advanced economies. The empirical results, based on a two-bloc setup and cover 1991 to 2015, are twofold. First, the paper shows that the size of the spillovers running from emerging markets to advanced economies is about a fifth...

This paper examines the role of monetary policy in fossil fuel exporters at different horizons. The main argument is that central banks in these economies need to look beyond the horizon of the business cycle. In the short run, (independent) monetary policy should flexibly target inflation. In...

This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...

This paper argues for a novel approach to financing infrastructure needs in Arab countries. It first describes the context of rising public debt in the region, contrasting it with the vast infrastructure needs. It then discusses the challenges in meeting these needs with traditional financing....

The paper deals with the economics of sustainability associated with the transformation of energy markets. It emphasizes the interrelations between technical changes and energy markets and how in turn the resulting transformations alter the sustainability of economic systems that are dependent...

The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about investors causing a "global land rush" . Large land deals can provide opportunities for better access to capital, transfer of technology, and advances in productivity and employment generation. But they...

This paper explores the effect of market orientation on (known) natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world-wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries. Consistent with the predictions of a two-region model, the empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output–the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first...

This paper is the first to quantify the relationship between the incidence of the digital economy and long-term frictional unemployment across countries. The resulting evidence indicates that there is a robust, negative partial correlation between national unemployment rates and the incidence of...