Debt in a Time of Protests

Posted on October 16, 2012 by iMFdirect

by Nemat Shafik

As the world economy continues to struggle, people are taking to the streets by the thousands to protest painful cuts in public spending designed to reduce government debt and deficits. This fiscal fury is understandable.

People want to regain the confidence they once had about the future when the economy was booming and more of us had jobs.

But after a protracted economic crisis, this will take planning, fair burden-sharing, and time itself.

If history is any guide, there is no silver bullet to debt reduction. Experience shows that it takes time to reduce government debt and deficits. Sustained efforts over many years will ultimately lead to success.

Most countries have made significant headway in rolling back fiscal deficits. By the end of next year in more than half of the world’s advanced economies, and about the same share of emerging markets, we expect deficits —adjusted for the economic cycle—to be at the same level or lower than before the global economic crisis hit in 2008.

But with a sluggish recovery, efforts at controlling debt stocks are taking longer to yield results, particularly in advanced economies. Gross public debt is nearing 80 percent of GDP on average for advanced economies—over 100 percent in several of them—and we do not expect it to stabilize before 2014-15.

So what can governments do to ease the pain and pave the way for successful debt reduction?

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Annual Meetings, Asia, Economic Crisis, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Fiscal policy, growth, IMF, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Politics, Public debt, recession | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Tharman Sees “Greater Global Policy Resolve”

Posted on October 14, 2012 by iMFdirect

“Although the economic environment has weakened, the policy resolve has strengthened.” This is how Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance , who is Chair of the IMF’s policy-setting committee, described the outcome of the IMF-World Bank annual meetings in Tokyo.

“Growth is slower than anyone expected,” he admitted in a video interview.  ”It is slower in Europe, it is not as fast as it should be in the United States, not as fast as it should be to bring unemployment down, and it is slowing in Asia to a greater extent than was expected. Tharman is chair of the 24-member IMFC.

“But we are now in a much better situation than six months ago when it comes to policy solutions.” He said there had been major steps forward in Europe “despite some disagreement on individual pieces.”  But underlying problems in the Eurozone, budget problems in the United States, and structural problems in global economy are longer term problems and “cannot be fixed quickly.”

For a quick brief on the outcomes from the meetings in Tokyo, take a look at:

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Annual Meetings, Asia, Civil Society, concessional lending, Debt Relief, Economic Crisis, Economic outlook, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Financial Crisis, Financial sector supervision, Fiscal policy, Global Governance, Globalization, growth, IMF, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Latin America, LICs, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics, Public debt | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Taking Stock: Public Finances Now Stronger in Many Countries

Posted on October 9, 2012 by iMFdirect

By Carlo Cottarelli

(Versions in  عربي, 中文, Español, Français, Русский, 日本語)

The slow global recovery is making fiscal adjustment more difficult around the world, but this doesn’t mean that little has been accomplished.

In fact, significant progress in many countries has been made during the past two years in strengthening their fiscal accounts after the 2008–09 deterioration.  The IMF’s latest Fiscal Monitor takes stock of this progress.

Deficits are lower, and in many cases debt is too

Let me first say something about advanced economies, which is where the most urgent fiscal problems exist.

Most advanced economies have made good progress lowering their fiscal deficits (the imbalance between spending and revenues). Deficits, adjusted for the economic cycle, fell by about ¾ of a percentage point of GDP in 2011 and 2012, and are projected to do so by about 1 percentage point of GDP in 2013.

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Annual Meetings, Asia, Economic Crisis, Economic outlook, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Fiscal policy, Global Governance, Globalization, growth, IMF, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Latin America, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics, Public debt | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Global Economy: Some Bad News and Some Hope

Posted on October 8, 2012 by iMFdirect

By Olivier Blanchard

(Versions in  عربي, 中文, Español, Français, Русский, 日本語)

The world economic recovery continues, but it has weakened further.  In advanced countries, growth is now too low to make a substantial dent in unemployment.  And in major emerging countries, growth that had been strong earlier has also decreased.

Let me give you a few numbers from our latest projections in the October World Economic Outlook released in Tokyo.

Relative to the IMF’s forecasts last April, our growth forecasts for 2013 have been revised down from 1.8%  to 1.5% for advanced countries, and from 5.8% down to 5.6% for emerging and developing countries.

The downward revisions are widespread.  They are however stronger for two sets of countries–for the members of the euro area, where we now expect growth close to zero in 2013, and for three of the large emerging market economies, China,  India, and Brazil.

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Annual Meetings, Asia, Economic Crisis, Economic outlook, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Financial Crisis, Fiscal policy, Fiscal Stimulus, Global Governance, growth, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Latin America, LICs, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics, Public debt | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Restoring Jobs by Restoring Growth

Posted on October 3, 2012 by iMFdirect

By Min Zhu

Over 200 million people are unemployed around the world, with double-digit jobless rates in many European countries and in many emerging markets. Youth unemployment and long-term unemployment are at alarming levels.

The number of unemployed people is nearly 16 million higher today than in 2007 among countries where labor markets are tracked regularly by the IMF. Much of this increase has been in advanced economies (Chart 1).

The need to tackle the unemployment crisis in these economies is self-evident. But what is to be done?

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Economic Crisis, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Fiscal policy, growth, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

United States: How Inequality Affects Saving Behavior

Posted on September 13, 2012 by iMFdirect

By Oya Celasun

(Version in Español)

The incomes of U.S. households have become more unevenly distributed over the past three decades. For example, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that after-tax income almost tripled for the top 1 percent of households between 1980 and 2007, but grew only 22 percent for the bottom 20 percent.

Recent research has focused on the link between income inequality and growth, but less attention has been paid to the link between inequality and savings. So together with a few colleagues we have looked at how income distribution is linked to saving behavior.

Saving rates matter because they are an important factor for the U.S. economic outlook. The decline in the saving rate in the years leading up to the crisis (from 10 percent of after-tax income in 1980 to 1.5 percent in 2005) is the mirror image of the unsustainable boom in consumer spending during the bubble years.

Following the crisis, sharp losses in the values of houses and financial assets, as well as difficulties in obtaining new credit, forced American families to save more and rebuild their wealth. The ensuing rise in the saving rate, which stood at 4 percent in the second quarter of 2012, has been an important reason why the recovery from the 2008–09 recession has been sluggish.

Therefore, our study looked at which types of households drove the aggregate saving rate down before the crisis and those that drove it up afterwards, so as to improve our ability to assess the potential for future U.S. growth.

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Economic Crisis, Economic outlook, Economic research, Finance, Financial Crisis, Fiscal policy, growth, IMF, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Politics, Public debt, recession | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Capital Controls: When Are Multilateral Considerations of the Essence?

Posted on September 7, 2012 by iMFdirect

By Jonathan D. Ostry

One of the main arguments against capital controls is that, though they may be in an individual country’s interest, they could be multilaterally destructive in the same way that tariffs on goods can be destructive.

A particular concern is that a country might impose controls to avoid necessary macroeconomic and external adjustment, in turn shifting the burden of adjustment onto other countries.

A proliferation of capital controls across countries, moreover, may not only undercut warranted adjustments of exchange rates and imbalances across the globe, it may lead in the logical extreme to a situation of financial autarky or isolation in the same way that trade wars can shrink the volume of world trade, seriously damaging global welfare.

So should multilateral considerations trump national interests?

Possible rationales for controls

To begin, it is worth reviewing some of the reasons why countries may wish to impose controls.

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Asia, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Global Governance, Globalization, growth, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Latin America, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics, Public debt | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Promoting Multilateral Solutions for a Globalized World

Posted on August 30, 2012 by iMFdirect

Jeremy CliftBy Jeremy Clift

(Version in Español,  عربي)

We live in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, helping to spread ideas, information, and technology ever more quickly. The globalized economy has created a complex and interlocking network of capital and trade flows that have brought major economic gains, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty around the world.

But, as we have seen from the prolonged global financial crisis, our interconnectedness carries grave risks as well as benefits. With instant communication comes the risk of rapid contagion. There is, thus, a strong public interest in ensuring that global economic integration is supported by a coherent set of coordinated national macroeconomic policies and a harmonized international regulatory regime that addresses the fragilities in our global financial system.

The new issue of Finance & Development magazine looks at different aspects of interconnectedness. Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and author of the forthcoming book The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World, argues that what he terms the global village increasingly requires global solutions to big emerging problems such as climate change.

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Asia, Civil Society, Debt Relief, Economic Crisis, Economic outlook, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Financial Crisis, Fiscal policy, Global Governance, Globalization, growth, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Latin America, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics, Public debt | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Top 20 — iMFdirect’s Top 20 list

Posted on August 23, 2012 by iMFdirect

Three years after the launch of iMFdirect as a forum for discussing economic issues around the world, we look back at some of our most popular posts.

The IMF blog has helped stimulate considerable debate about economic policy in the current crisis, on events in Europe and around the world in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, on fiscal adjustment, on regulating the financial sector, and the future of macroeconomics–as economists learn lessons from the Great Recession.

As readers struggled to understand the implications of the crisis, our most popular post by far was IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard’s Four Hard Truths, a look back at 2011 and the economic lessons for the future.

Here’s our Top 20 list of our most popular posts by subject (from more than 300 posts):

1.  Global Crisis: Four Hard Truths; Driving With the Brakes On

2.  Financial Stability: What’s Still to Be Done?

3.  Fiscal Policy:  Ten Commandments ; Striking the Right Balance

4.  Macroeconomic Policy: Rewriting the Playbook;  Nine Tentative Conclusions ; Future Study

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Asia, Economic Crisis, Economic research, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Financial Crisis, Financial regulation, Financial sector supervision, Fiscal policy, Fiscal Stimulus, Global Governance, Globalization, growth, IMF, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Latin America, LICs, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics, Public debt, recession | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Growing Institutions? Grow the People!

Posted on August 10, 2012 by iMFdirect

By Sharmini Coorey

(Version in Español)

“When you speak about institutions, in fact, you are speaking about the people.” These words, by Kosovo’s central bank governor Gani Gergüri at a recent conference in Vienna, capture an important truth that is often overlooked when we economists discuss amongst ourselves: without sound institutions, it’s very hard to achieve sustainable economic growth.

And the quality of those institutions hinges on the quality of the people running them―their educational background and training, and the prevailing business culture and approach to policymaking.

The work of Douglass North and the school of thought known as the new institutional economics has taught us that differences in deep institutions—defined as the formal and informal rules of economic, political and social interactions—are responsible for sustained differences in economic performance. This is also the central thesis in Acemoglu and Robinson’s fascinating new book, Why Nations Fail.

Inclusive (as opposed to extractive) economic and political institutions are central in nations’ efforts to avoid stagnation and ensure sustained prosperity. This is because sustained prosperity is a dynamic process of constant innovation and a never-ending cycle of Schumpeterian creative destruction, which can only be supported by open, inclusive institutions. Their thesis is certainly consistent with the contrasting experience of different countries in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe under communism and during the past two decades.

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Africa, Asia, Civil Society, Economic Crisis, Emerging Markets, Employment, Europe, Finance, Financial sector supervision, Global Governance, Globalization, IMF, Inequality, International Monetary Fund, Latin America, LICs, Low-income countries, Middle East, Multilateral Cooperation, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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