Past Event
The role of the IMF in the post-COVID-19 fiscal stabilization and recovery
Fireside chat with Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
Past Event
Fireside chat with Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
Opinion
This article was originally published in the Observer Research Foundation. As Brazil, Russia, India and Mexico record the fast spread of the Covid-19 contagion, a third wave of the pandemic is reaching the emerging world. As a result, business sentiment has decreased in March and April in the region. What’s more, as emerging economies gradually […]
Policy Contribution
COVID-19 is by far the biggest challenge policymakers in emerging economies have had to deal with in recent history. Beyond the potentially large negative impact on these countries’ fiscal accounts, and the related solvency issues, worsening conditions for these countries’ external funding are a major challenge.
External Publication
This paper shows how the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP) could be streamlined and its underlying conceptual framework clarified. Implementation of the country-specific recommendations is low; their internal consistency is sometimes missing; despite past reforms, the MIP remains largely a countryby-country approach running the risk of aggravating the deflationary bias in the euro area. We recommend to streamline the scoreboard around a few meaningful indicators, involve national macro-prudential and productivity councils, better connect the various recommendations, simplify the language and further involve the Commission into national policy discussions. This document was prepared for the Economic Governance Support Unit at the request of the ECON Committee.
Opinion
In the last 50 years, the most important economic development has been the diminishing income gap between the richer and poorer countries. Now, there is a growing realisation that transformations in the global economy have been re-established centrally from intangible investments, to digital networks, to finance and exchange rates.
Blog Post
No other country lost as many positions as Greece and Italy in the rankings of European countries by Gross National Income per head, between 1990 and 2017. The tentative conclusion here is that more complex, country-specific stories – beyond the euro, or the specific euro-area fiscal rules – are needed to explain these individual performances.
Blog Post
The EU fiscal framework strongly relies on the structural budget balance indicator, which aims to measure the ‘underlying’ position of the budget. But this indicator is not observed, only estimations can be made. This post shows that estimates of the European Commission, the IMF, the OECD and national governments widely differ from each other and all estimates are subject to very large annual revisions. The EU should get rid of the fiscal rules that rely on structural balance estimates and use this opportunity to fundamentally reform its fiscal framework.
Blog Post
A campaign against “nonsense” consensus output gaps has been launched on social media. It has triggered responses focusing on the implications of output gaps for fiscal policy under EU rules, especially for Italy. But the debate about the reliability of output-gap estimates is more wide-ranging.
Past Event
At this event Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist at the IMF will discuss the role of national structural reforms in enhancing resilience in the Euro Area.
Opinion
Είναι γεγονός ότι οι τωρινές εκλογές λόγω της ανάπτυξης των κομμάτων του λαϊκισμού είναι κάπως διαφορετικές από τις προηγούμενες. Αλλά πιστεύω ότι όλες οι εκλογικές διαδικασίες, εθνικές και ευρωπαϊκές, έχουν πάντα πολύ μεγάλη σημασία γιατί θέτουν μια ατζέντα για τα επόμενα πέντε χρόνια και εμείς ως πολίτες καλούμαστε να επιλέξουμε τις σωστές προτεραιότητες και να δώσουμε την εμπιστοσύνη μας στους κατάλληλους ανθρώπους.
Blog Post
Germany is having a political debate on the adjustment of its budgetary plans due to revised forecasts, and an academic debate on the debt brake. Yet, since 2011, general government revenues and surpluses have been systematically and significantly higher than forecast. The German surplus reached 1.7% of GDP in 2018. This bias did not exist from 1999-2008 before the introduction of the debt brake. While the IMF also got its forecasts of German surpluses wrong, the extent of the bias is larger for the German government’s forecasts. These data suggest that the political debate should focus on the debt brake and its implementation rather than on how to close the budgetary ‘hole’.
Blog Post
With the end of the Greece support programme, authorities now have scope to focus on the legacy of NPLs and excess private-sector debt. Two wide-ranging schemes are under discussion. They should be assessed in terms of required state support, likely investor appetite for problematic bank assets, and institutional capacity to manage a complex new organisation tasked with debt restructuring.