This paper presents the second set of PRGT borrowing agreements that have been finalized through April 2023 as part of the loan mobilization round launched in July 2021 to cover the cost of pandemic-related lending and support the self-sustainability of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT). Seven of the eight agreements presented use SDRs in the context of SDR channeling. Together these agreements provide a total of SDR 5.1 billion in new PRGT loan resources for low-income countries (LICs).
Thin capitalization rules (TCRs) aim to mitigate profit shifting by multinational corporations (MNCs) but, by raising the cost of capital for affected affiliates, can also negatively affect real investment. Exploiting unique panel data on multinational companies in 34 countries during 2006-2014, we estimate that the size of this adverse investment effect can be large, and dependent on the statutory corporate tax rate and the tightness of the safe-haven ratio. Negative investment effects are more pronounced for highly-levered firms for which TCRs are more likely to be binding.
Finland has pledged to cut net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2035 and has sectoral targets for deploying electric vehicles, phasing out coal generation, and oil-based space heating. Fiscal policies at the national and sectoral level could play a critical role in achieving these objectives. Carbon dioxide emissions are already priced significantly in Finland but prices vary substantially across fuels and sectors. The paper discusses a reform to both scale up, and progressively harmonize, pricing while using revenues to address equity issues. It also discusses the potential use of revenue-neutral feebate schemes to strengthen mitigation incentives for the transportation, industry, building, forestry, and agricultural sectors.
A strong and widely acknowledged record of economic success-including a three-and-a-half-fold increase in per capita income since 1994--places Rwanda among the world’s fastest--growing economies. Traumatic memories of the 1994 genocide are gradually fading, as associations begin to take a more positive form--of a nation on the rise, powered by human resilience, a sense of common purpose, and a purposeful government. Past successes and a sense of frailty have fueled aspirations for a secure, prosperous, and modern future. Sustaining high rates of economic growth is at the heart of these ambitions. Recent formulations of the nation’s Vision 2050 set a target of achieving upper-middle-income status by 2035 and high-income status by 2050. Future Drivers of Growth in Rwanda: Innovation, Integration, Agglomeration, and Competition, a joint undertaking by experts from Rwanda and the World Bank Group, evaluates the country’s possibilities and options in this endeavor. The report identifies four essential drivers of growth--innovation, integration, agglomeration, and competition--and reforms in six priority areas: human capital development, export dynamism and regional integration, well-managed urbanization, competitive domestic enterprises, agricultural modernization, and capable and accountable public institutions.
Transforming Africa: How Savings Groups Foster Financial Inclusion, Resilience and Economic Development presents in-depth empirical research into current day savings group activities across Africa, exploring savings groups through the lens of financial inclusion and reflecting on formal finance, economic and social outcomes.
‘Institutional Change and Economic Development’ discusses not just theoretical issues but a diverse range of real-life institutions – political, bureaucratic, fiscal, financial, corporate, legal, social and industrial – in the context of dozens of countries across time and space, spanning Britain, Switzerland and the USA in the past to Botswana, Brazil, and China today.
The recovery of the Asia-Pacific region from the global economic crisis of 2008_2009 is underway but incomplete. Risks range from slow growth and persistent unemployment to re-emerging international imbalances and financial volatility. While early policy responses to the crisis were successful in avoiding a larger calamity, new policy strategies are now needed to resolve imbalances among the United States, China, and other economies, and to build robust demand in the medium term. This report, drafted by an international team of experts for the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC), provides a policy framework for completing the recovery and achieving sustained growth beyond it. The report identifies priorities for replacing stimulus programmes with structural reforms, and for launching new growth engines to drive investment and employment throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Led by Professor Peter Petri (Brandeis University/East-West Center), the team included eminent scholars from China, Japan, the United States and other countries. The report presents a regional strategy as well as separate, detailed analyses of the challenges facing China, Advanced Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America. It concludes that inclusive, balanced, sustained growth in the region is feasible, but will require structural reforms that change economic relationships within economies and among them, and substantial international cooperation in implementing coherent national policies.
The book is reclaiming economics as a moral science. It argues that ethics is a relevant and inseparable aspect of all levels of economic activity, from individual and organizational to societal and global. Taking ethical considerations into account is needed in explaining and predicting the behavior of economic agents as well as in evaluating and designing economic policies and mechanisms. The unique feature of the book is that it not only analyzes ethics and economics on an abstract level, but puts behavioral, institutional and systemic issues together for a robust and human view of economic functioning. It sees economic “facts” as interwoven with human intentionality and ethical content, a domain where utility calculations and moral considerations co-determine the behavior of economic agents and the outcomes of their activities. The book employs the personalist approach that sees human persons – endowed with free will and conscience – as the basic agents of economic life and defines human flourishing as the final end of economic activities. The book demonstrates that economics can gain a lot in meaning and also in analytical power by reuniting itself with ethics.
The Nordic financial crisis had it all: a botched liberalization, a huge boom followed by an even bigger bust, massive taxpayer-financed bailouts and, finally, deep long-run gains. The first-class team of scholars mobilized in this book convincingly tell a story that should be carefully studied by economists, bankers and policymakers. After this book, no one should be able to say: If we only knew ! Charles Wyplosz, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, Switzerland The financial crisis in Scandinavia in the early 1990s was a forerunner of the later world-wide crisis in 2007/8. Although the initial causation was different, the impact on their banks, though more localised, was just as severe. So we can benefit, and already policymakers have done so, from learning the lessons in this book on how to restore shattered banking systems to health. For this we owe a debt of gratitude to the editors, who have put together a series of key papers that emerged from a much larger exercise on the crisis that was earlier reported in four volumes in Swedish and Finnish. Amongst the many studies on current and past financial crises, this is a classic must-read . Charles A.E. Goodhart, London School of Economics, UK The Nordic experience with financial crisis resolution could not be more timely. Everyone cites it as an example of how it should be done , but rarely does one find careful and detailed analysis. Now policymakers and others searching for guidance will know where to look. Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, US Following World War II, Nordic countries were commonly regarded as successful and stable economies. This perception was, however, shattered in the early 1990s when Finland and Sweden encountered severe financial crises. Here, the authors explore the symptoms of financial crisis decreasing real income, soaring unemployment and exploding public deficits and their devastating effects. The book compares and contrasts the experiences of Finland and Sweden, then adopts an international perspective, encompassing the experiences of Asia, Latin America, Denmark and Norway. Lessons from the 1990s crisis are drawn, and possible solutions prescribed. The conclusion is that long-term effects of financial crises financial liberalization and integration are not as dramatic as the short-term effects, but may prove to be of greater importance over time. Only the future will show whether these long-term benefits will balance or even outweigh the enormous short-term costs of the crises. Highly relevant to the current international financial crisis currently afflicting the world economy, this timely book will prove invaluable to economists and other social scientists with a general interest in financial crises, and to those with a more specific interest in the evolution and models of Scandinavian economies.
Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.
