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Zamid Aligishiev
The Bahamas is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including gradual sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and intensifying hurricanes. Together, these challenges threaten to undermine the country’s potential output over the long term by inflicting damages to physical assets and eroding natural capital, which is vital to its tourism-driven economy. Importantly, these risks are unevenly distributed with smaller islands being more exposed and sensitive than the larger, more developed ones. Addressing these disparities as well as closing economy-wide adaptation needs through investments in structural resilience can unlock large potential output gains.
United Nations
,
European Commission
,
Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations
,
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
,
United Nations Environment Programme
, and
World Bank

Abstract

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting: Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) constitutes an integrated and comprehensive statistical framework for organizing data about habitats and landscapes, measuring the ecosystem services, tracking changes in ecosystem assets, and linking this information to economic and other human activity. The United Nations Statistical Commission adopted the SEEA Ecosystem Accounting at its 52nd session in March 2021. This adoption follows a comprehensive and inclusive process of detailed testing, consultation and revision. Today, ecosystem accounts have already been used to inform policy development in more than 34 countries.

Ken Miyajima
Econometric results suggest that Qatar’s strong capital spending multiplier became less impactful as the stock of capital rose to a high level, likely as the marginal impact declined. This supports Qatar’s strategy to shifts the State’s role to an enabler of private sector-led growth, focusing on expenditure to support build human capital and implementation of broader reform guided by the Third National Development Strategy.
International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.

Econometric results suggest that Qatar’s strong capital spending multiplier became less impactful as the stock of capital rose to a high level, likely as the marginal impact declined. This supports Qatar’s strategy to shifts the State’s role to an enabler of private sector-led growth, focusing on expenditure to support build human capital and implementation of broader reform guided by the Third National Development Strategy.

Alessia De Stefani
and
Rui Mano
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.
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.

The Bahamas is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including gradual sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and intensifying hurricanes. Together, these challenges threaten to undermine the country’s potential output over the long term by inflicting damages to physical assets and eroding natural capital, which is vital to its tourism-driven economy. Importantly, these risks are unevenly distributed with smaller islands being more exposed and sensitive than the larger, more developed ones. Addressing these disparities as well as closing economy-wide adaptation needs through investments in structural resilience can unlock large potential output gains.

Edouard Martin
and
Felix J Vardy
This paper examines the macroeconomic frameworks of IMF-supported programs with low-income countries from 2009 to 2022, focusing on how macroeconomic targets and their achievement differ between fragile and conflicted-affected states (FCS) and non-FCS. Key findings include similar program targets for FCS and non-FCS, optimism in all dimensions considered other than inflation, and no significant correlation between targets and outcomes. For variables other than inflation, country-independent targets equal to the mean or median outcomes of other programs outperform program projections as predictors of actual outcomes. This underscores the challenges in setting realistic, country and program-specific targets in IMF-supported programs with low-income countries. Finally, we discuss potential caveats, including GDP rebenchmarking, non-linear relationship between initial conditions and targets, and repeat programs. We do not study, and make no claims about, causality.
Andinet Woldemichael
and
Iyke Maduako
Housing represents the largest asset and liability, in the form of mortgages, on most national balance sheet. For most households it is their largest investment, and when mortgages are required also represents the largest component of household debt. It is also directly tied to financial markets, both the mortgage market and insurance sector. Although many countries have a rich set of housing censuses and statistics, others have large data gap in this area and therefore struggle to formulate effective policies. This paper proposes an approach to construct a global census of residential buildings using opensource satellite data. Such a layer can be used to assess the extent these buildings are exposed to climate hazards and how their production and consumption, in turn, affect the climate. The approach we propose could be scaled globally, combining existing layers of building footprints, climate and socioeconomic data. It adds to the ongoing effort of compiling spatially explicit and granular climate indicators to better inform policies. As a case study, we compute selected indicators and estimate the extent of residential properties exposure to riverine flood risk for Kenya.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.

Driven by strong demand, including from foreign investors, and scarce housing supply, house prices in Croatia have risen considerably, stretching house affordability. Unlike in the 2000s, financial stability risks are contained, partly reflecting a low share of mortgage finance. Improving housing affordability can support labor mobility, promote sustainable economic development, and counter negative emigration trends. Policies need to tackle the underlying supply gap in housing rather than helping demand. There is scope to modernize and make better use of the sizable existing housing stock. Reducing or removing the favorable tax treatment of residential real estate investment and short-term rental income would help reduce speculative demand and activate idle housing. Policy action is also warranted to accelerate the modernization of the legal cadaster, develop the longer-term rental market, streamline land regulations, and invest in green social housing and infrastructure.

JaeBin Ahn
,
Chan Kim
,
Nan Li
, and
Andrea Manera
This paper examines the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on knowledge diffusion by analyzing the effect of firm-level FDI activities on cross-border patent citations. We construct a novel firm-level panel dataset that combines worldwide utility patent and citations data with project-level greenfield FDI and crossborder mergers and acquisitions (M&A) data over the past two decades, covering firms across 60 countries. Applying a new local projection difference-indifferences methodology, our analysis reveals that FDI significantly enhances knowledge flows both from and to the investing firms. Citation flows between investing firms and host countries increase by up to around 10.6% to 13% in five years after the initial investment. These effects are stronger when host countries have higher innovation capacities or are technologically more similar to the investing firm. We also uncover knowledge spillovers beyond targeted firms and industries in host countries, which are particularly more pronounced for sectors closely connected in the technology space.