White Papers
IMF Working Paper-Understanding the Macroeconomic Effects of Natural Disasters
February 21, 2025-Summary
Climate change is causing more frequent and devastating natural disasters. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it examines the dynamic effects of natural disasters on the growth of output and its components. Government expenditure in advanced economies (AEs) rises immediately in the same year of the natural disaster, offsetting the decline in private investment growth and thereby mitigating the negative effect on output growth.
As a result, output growth in AEs is not significantly affected by natural disasters. In contrast, the increase in government expenditure in emerging markets and developing countries (EMDEs) after a natural disaster is smaller and thus, unable to mitigate the contemporaneous negative effect on output growth (which mainly reflects the fall in investment in non-small-island EMDEs and in net exports in small-island EMDEs). In addition, the output recovery in the subsequent year does not fully offset the decline during the year of the disaster. Second, this paper assesses the role of pre-existing country characteristics in mitigating the adverse impact of natural disasters. The paper finds that small islands and countries with limited pre-disaster fiscal space tend to experience more significant declines in output growth following a natural disaster.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Prometheus Unbound: What Makes Fintech Grow?
February 21, 2025-Summary
The rise of financial technologies-fintech-could have transformative effects on the financial landscape, expanding the reach of services beyond the confines of geography and creating new competitive sources of finance for households and firms. But what makes fintech grow? Why do some countries have more financial innovation than others?
In this paper, I use a comprehensive dataset to investigate the emergence and spread of fintech in a diverse panel of 98 countries over the period 2012-2020.
This empirical analysis helps ascertain economic, demographic, technological and institutional factors that enable the development of fintech. The magnitude and statistical significance of these factors vary according to the type of fintech instrument and the level of economic development (advanced economies vs. developing countries). Finally, these findings reveal that policies and structural reforms can help promote financial innovation and cultivate fintech ventures-particularly by strengthening technological and institutional infrastructures and reducing cybersecurity threats.
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Source: imf.org
White Paper-Monetary Policy Predicts Currency Movements
February 9, 2025--Abstract
The relative restrictiveness of a central bank's supply of money predicts the raw and risk-adjusted returns of its currency-both next month and at least three years into the future.
Archived data, known by currency traders at the time, estimates central bank restrictiveness as a scaling of the residual from out-of-sample panel regressions of M1 on macroeconomic variables tied to domestic and international transaction requirements. Carry's ability to forecast currency returns is subsumed by the central bank restrictiveness signal, which also forecasts inflation.
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Source: ssrn.com
Social Security Reforms, Retirement and Sectoral Decisions
January 31, 2025--Summary
In many countries, the regulations governing pension systems, hiring procedures, and job contracts differ between the public and private sectors. Public sector employees tend to have longer tenures and higher wages compared to workers in the private sector.
As such, social security reforms can affect both retirement decisions and sectoral choices. We study the effects of social security reforms on retirement and sectoral behavior in an economy with multiple pension systems.
We develop a general equilibrium life-cycle model with heterogeneous agents, three sectors - private formal, private informal and public - and endogenous retirement. We quantitatively assess the long-run effects of reforms being discussed and implemented around the world. Among them, we study the unification of pension systems and increasing the minimum retirement age. We calibrate our model to Brazil, where several of the retirement conditions resemble those of other countries. We find that these reforms lower the likelihood of individuals to apply to a public job and increase the profile of savings over the life cycle. In the long run, these reforms lead to higher output and capital, reduced informality, and average welfare gains. They also drastically reduce the social security deficit.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Tokenization and Financial Market Inefficiencies
January 29, 2025--Summary
Most financial assets are digital today. Tomorrow, they may be tokenized. Tokenization implies recording and transferring assets on a widely shared and trusted digital ledger that can be programmed. Interest in tokenization is strong and experiments abound, but what are the consequences of this new trend for financial markets?
This note introduces a taxonomy and a conceptual framework centered on market inefficiencies to evaluate this question. Some inefficiencies could decline across the asset life cycle. Others would remain, however, and new ones could emerge. Issuing, servicing, and redeeming assets might involve fewer intermediaries and thus become cheaper. The costs of trading assets may also decrease as tokenization lowers some counterparty risks and search frictions and offers flexibility in settlement. Additionally, greater competition among brokers could lower transaction fees.
However, tokenization may amplify shocks if it induces institutions to become more interconnected and hold lower liquidity buffers or higher leverage, potentially jeopardizing financial stability. Programs themselves may introduce new risks related to strings of contingent contracts or faulty code. While competition may grow among financial intermediaries, the provision of market infrastructure could become more concentrated due to network effects.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working paper-Long-Term Debt and Short-Term Rates: Fixed-Rate Mortgages and Monetary Transmission
January 24, 2016--Summary
We study the two-way relationship between fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) and monetary policy in a panel of up to 35 countries over the last two decades. The dataset includes quarterly information on the composition of mortgage flows and stock by type of rate-fixation and monetary policy shocks cleaned of information effects.
Using instrumental-variablel local projections, we find both path-and state-dependency in monetary transmission. Monetary policy shapes mortgage choice, increasing (decreasing) the share of FRMs during easing (tightening) cycles. Over time, this mechanism alters the composition of the outstanding mortgage stock which, in turn, affects the central bank's ability to stabilize the economy ex-post. A greater (lower) prevalence of FRMs weakens (strengthens) monetary policy transmission to key macro-variables.
Spillovers from Large Emerging Economies: How Dominant Is China?
January 24, 2016--Summary
This paper investigates the global economic spillovers emanating from G20 emerging markets (G20-EMs), with a particular emphasis on the comparative influence of China. Employing a Bayesian Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model, we assess the impacts of both demand-side and supply-side shocks across 63 countries, capturing the nuanced dynamics of global economic interactions. Our findings reveal that China's contribution to global economic spillovers significantly overshadows that of other G20-EMs.
Specifically, China's domestic shocks have significantly larger and more pervasive spillover effects on global GDP, inflation and commodity prices compared to shocks from other G20-EMs. In contrast, spillovers from other G20-EMs are more regionally contained with modest global impacts. The study underscores China's outsized role in shaping global economic dynamics and the limited capacity of other G20-EMs to mitigate any potential negative implications from China's economic slowdown in the near term.
view the IMF Working paper-Spillovers from Large Emerging Economies: How Dominant Is China?
Source: IMF
IMF-Walkways, Not Walls
December 31, 2024 -Macroeconomics, by definition, focuses on the big picture. It neglects smaller micro developments at the business or sectoral level. In 2007, Edward Leamer, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, pointed out the high costs of this neglect by arguing that it's meaningless to try to understand business cycles without paying attention to the housing sector.
As he argued in a now-famous paper titled "Housing IS the Business Cycle," the housing market is central to understanding why economies go through booms and busts. He pointed out that nearly all recessions in the United States since World War II were preceded by problems in the housing sector. Macroeconomics would, in other words, be better served by building walkways to housing economics rather than simply walling it off.
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Source: imf.org
New IRENA-WTO report highlights key trade policies for renewable hydrogen and derivatives
November 14, 2024--The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the WTO Secretariat launched on 14 November at the 29th UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku a new report which outlines key policy considerations for fostering trade in renewable hydrogen and its derivatives. The report highlights, in particular, their crucial role in helping economies achieve decarbonization goals by 2050.
Building on the WTO-IRENA joint report published last year about scaling up green hydrogen production, the new publication titled "Enabling global trade in renewable hydrogen and derivative commodities" further explores the critical role of sound and coherent trade strategies in promoting renewable hydrogen and derived feedstocks and fuels, such as renewable ammonia, methanol and e-kerosene.
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Source: World Trade Organization (WTO)
IMF Working Paper-How Far Has Globalization Gone? A Tale of Two Regions
December 8, 2023--Summary:
We study the evolution of trade globalization in a set of countries in Latin America (mostly the largest ones) and Asia over the past 25 years. Relying on structural gravity models, we first estimate a proxy of trade globalization that captures the ease of trading internationally with respect to trading domestically. Results indicate that the evolution of trade globalization since the mid-1990s has been similar between the two regions, but very heterogeneous within them.
Trade globalization has been particularly strong in agriculture, mining and manufacturing, but has lagged in services. The paper also documents that trade globalization has been particularly strong in agriculture, mining and manufacturing, but it lagged in services. Within region heterogeneity is associated to a set of trade policy instruments, including tariffs, non-tariff measures, WTO membership. and trade agreements. Next, we quantify the economic implications of the estimated globalization trends. Simulations of a multi-sector trade model point to heterogeneous long-term impacts of globalization on GDP-some countries exhibiting substantial gains and others experiencing large losses-, with no single sector playing a preponderant role.
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Source: imf.org
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