The outbreak of COVID-19 and the wide-ranging measures needed to slow its advance triggered an unprecedented collapse in oil demand, a surge in oil inventories, and a record one-month decline in oil prices in March 2020. This paper examines the likely implications of the 2020 oil price plunge...

In the past four to five decades, inflation has fallen around the world, with median annual global consumer price inflation down from a peak of 16.6 percent in 1974 to 2.6 percent in 2017. This decline began in advanced economies in the mid-1980s and in emerging market and developing economies...

Rapid growth among the major emerging markets over the past 20 years has boosted global demand for commodities. The seven largest emerging markets accounted for almost all the increase in global consumption of metals, and two-thirds of the increase in energy consumption over this period. As...

Trade growth has slowed sharply since the global financial crisis. U.S. trade data highlights that arm's-length trade —trade between unaffiliated firms—accounts disproportionately for the overall post-crisis trade slowdown. This is partly because arm's-length trade depends more heavily than...

Major resource discoveries have transformed growth prospects for many low-income countries. However, the sharp downturn in commodity prices in recent years is affecting resource investment in these countries, and may delay the development of recent discoveries into production. This study...

Benign financing conditions since the global financial crisis and, more recently, rising financing needs have fueled a rapid increase in credit to the nonfinancial private sector, especially to the corporate sector, in emerging markets and developing economies. Credit growth has been most...

This paper assesses the implications of Chinese capital account liberalization for capital flows. Stylized facts from capital account liberalization in advanced and large emerging market economies illustrate that capital account liberalization has historically generated large gross capital in-...

This paper explores inflation determinants within the EU and implications for new members' euro adoption plans. Factor analysis partitions observed inflation in EU25 countries into common-origin and country-specific (idiosyncratic) components. Cross-country differences in common-origin inflation...

Globalization operates not only by reducing domestic pressures on inflation but also by reducing the scope of domestic authorities to influence the pace of inflation. First, as markets are integrated, the common, cross-border sources of inflation increase, reducing the extent of...

Money demand in dollarized economies often appears to be highly unstable, making it difficult to forecast and control inflation. In this paper, we show that a stable money demand function for Russia can be found for quot;effective broad money,quot; which includes an estimate of foreign cash...