Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel, oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the sources of the recent decline in prices, and examines its macroeconomic, financial and policy implications. The recent drop...

Potential growth — the rate of expansion an economy can sustain at full capacity and employment — is a critical driver of development progress. It is also a major input in the formulation of fiscal and monetary policies over the business cycle. This paper introduces the most comprehensive...

The Great Financial Crisis of 2007-09 confirmed the vital importance of advancing our understanding of macrofinancial linkages, the two-way interactions between the real economy and the financial sector. The crisis was a bitter reminder of how sharp fluctuations in asset prices, credit and...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

Potential growth - the rate of expansion an economy can sustain at full capacity and employment - is a critical driver of development progress. It is also a major input in the formulation of fiscal and monetary policies over the business cycle. This paper introduces the most comprehensive...

Potential output growth around the world slowed over the past two decades. This slowdown is expected to continue in the remainder of the 2020s: global potential growth is projected to average 2.2 percent per year in 2022-30, 0.4 percentage point below its 2011-21 average. Emerging market and...

Across the world, a structural growth slowdown is underway: at current trends, the global potential growth rate - the maximum rate at which an economy can grow without igniting inflation - is expected to fall to a three-decade low over the remainder of the 2020s. The slowdown could be even more...

This paper examines the impact of rising trade and financial integration on international business cycle comovement among a large group of industrial and developing countries. The results provide at best limited support for the conventional wisdom that globalization has increased the degree of...

This paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a typical African economy. In our framework, external...

This paper examines the global drivers of inflation in 55 countries over the 1970-2022 period. We estimate a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression model for each country and assess the importance of several global (demand, supply, and oil price) and domestic shocks. We report three main...