Developing East Asia is leading the global economic recovery, although performance varies across the region. In some countries, the monetary stance is already being tightened in light of emerging inflationary pressures; but it is premature to withdraw the fiscal stimulus until the global...

An energetic debate on the danger of a global currency war has flared up in recent months, stoked by a renewed move to “quantitative easing” in the United States, resurgent capital flows to developing countries and strong upward pressure on emerging market currencies. This Economic Premise...

Since the onset of the global financial crisis, there has been an upswing of interest among some prominent policy makers and academics in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Right (SDR) as a “safe” international reserve asset. But preexisting constraints on the SDR and...

As the year 2012 unfolds, its main legacy will be its game changing impact on global financial markets. Waning global growth along with central banksÕ bold monetary easing policies in advanced economies (AEs) to try to reverse it are changing market dynamics in unexpected ways, across both AEs...

The Asian style of regional integration may be seen as a “quasi-common economy” that eschews a formal linkup in political or monetary terms, but manages to generate similar results by strong physical integration and distributed chains of production and service delivery. This note proposes...

The World Bank and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) jointly prepared a new global data set of bilateral trade costs based on trade and production data. Accessible on the World Bank Open Data Web site, it opens new analytical possibilities for...

Sustained growth in emerging markets and developing economies requires long-term, reliable capital to finance productive investment, including in basic infrastructure. However, the availability and composition of long-term financing is constrained, partly due to fragile market conditions and...

The combination of an increasing trade imbalance, concerns about deindustrialization after several years of booming commodity prices, and rising imports of intermediate inputs and capital goods over the last decade has triggered new restrictive trade measures that have been gaining ground in...

Brazilian exports of goods and services have grown sharply in recent years, with sales nearly three times higher in 2010 than in 2000. However, Brazil faces considerable competitiveness challenges: its export performance depends mostly on favorable geographical and sector composition effects....

As tariff levels have reached all-time lows in recent decades, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have taken a central role in the international trade agenda. In a nutshell, NTMs are all types of trade regulations, other than tariffs, that directly or indirectly affect international trade. The World...