Many observers, including officials at the Federal Reserve, have focused on the need for wages to decelerate if progress toward reducing inflation is to be sustained. We agree that current elevated rates of wage growth would not be consistent with the Fed's 2 percent inflation target in the...

A persistent issue for central banks in emerging market economies (EMEs) has been their difficulties in pursuing counter-cyclical monetary policies such as those adopted in advanced economies (AEs). The flexible inflation targeting pursued by most AE central banks entails tightening monetary...

Consumer price inflation in the United States registered 8.2 percent in April 2022, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI). Core CPI inflation, which excludes the costs of energy and food, printed at 6.1 percent. These are the highest rates since the early 1980s, and have understandably...

This paper develops an empirical model of the economic impact of COVID-19 and uses it to gauge how the evolution of the pandemic will affect the global economic recovery.

The emerging-market and developing economies face a multitude of grave challenges as they confront the COVID-19 pandemic, including a critical lack of budgetary space. Observers have highlighted the need to bolster the international financial institutions' lending capacity in the event of a...

In this paper, a modified 'early warning system' (EWS) approach is developed to identify the roles of domestic and external factors in emerging market crises. Several probit models of currency crises were estimated for 26 emerging market countries. These models were used to identify the separate...

This paper compares the response of inflation to changes in exchange rate competitiveness in various regions of the world. The paper first presents evidence that an empirical relationship between the rate of inflation and the level of the real exchange rate holds for a large set of countries. It...