Despite strong economic growth since 2000, many low-income countries (LICs) still face numerous macroeconomic challenges, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the deceleration in real GDP growth during the 2008 global financial crisis, LICs on average saw 4.5 percent of real GDP growth...

Timely data availability is a long-standing challenge in policy-making and analysis for low-income developing countries. This paper explores the use of Google Trends' data to narrow such information gaps and finds that online search frequencies about a country significantly correlate with...

Pacific island countries are exposed to significant risks from natural disasters. As adisaster relief measure, Fiji allowed pre-retirement pension withdrawls in the wake ofCyclone Winston in 2016. Motivated by this policy action, we provide a normativeanalysis of the use of early pension...

Minimum trace reconciliation, developed by Wickramasuriya et. al. (2019), is an innovation in the literature on forecast reconciliation. The proof, however, has a gap and the idea is not easy to be extended to more general situations. This paper fills the gap by providing an alternative proof...

Minimum trace reconciliation, developed by Wickramasuriya et. al. (2019), is an innovation in the literature of forecast reconciliation. The proof, however, is indirect and not easy to extend to more general situations. This paper provides an alternative proof based on the first-order condition...

In developing economies, a shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic varies substantially. An increase in teleworking days per week ranges from 0.7 to 17.6 percentage points across 10 developing countries covered by an online survey to about 500 respondents per country. An...

Quarterly GDP statistics facilitate timely economic assessment, but the availability of such data are limited for more than 60 developing economies, including about 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa as well as more than two-thirds of fragile and conflict-affected states. To address this limited...

In developing economies, a shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic varies substantially. An increase in teleworking days per week ranges from 0.7 to 17.6 percentage points across 10 developing countries covered by an online survey to about 500 respondents per country. An...

Minimum trace reconciliation, developed by Wickramasuriya et. al. (2019), is an innovation in the literature of forecast reconciliation. The proof, however, is indirect and not easy to extend to more general situations. This paper provides an alternative proof based on the first-order condition...