As Malaysia strives to become a high-income economy, the need for advanced and specialized skills will be crucial to maintain its economic competitiveness. Sophisticated skills, whether cognitive, technical or socio-emotional, are built on strong foundational skills. Malaysia has expanded early...

A large literature has documented that fiscal policy is procyclical in emerging markets and developing economies and acyclical/countercyclical in advanced economies. This paper analyzes fiscal procyclicality in commodity-exporting countries. It first shows that the degree of fiscal...

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, global learning levels were unacceptably low. In 2019, learning poverty, the share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10, had reached 57 percent in low- and middle-income countries (World Bank and others 2022b). This constituted a global...

What does the macroeconomy look like in the aftermath of tariff changes This study estimates impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries from 1963 to 2014. Tariff increases are associated with persistent, economically and statistically...

This paper studies commodity price cycles and their underlying drivers using a dynamic factor model. The study employs a sample of 39 monthly commodity prices over 1970:01 to 2019:12. The analysis identifies global and group-specific cycles in commodity markets and includes them in a structural...