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International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.
Swift and decisive policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic has helped to mitigate the health and economic impact of the crisis. Fast vaccination rollout has also strengthened the economy’s resilience to new pandemic waves, paving the way for a speedy recovery. As the economy rebounds, a gradual exit from pandemic support measures is underway.
Mizuho Kida
and
Simon Paetzold
The Financial Action Task Force’s gray list publicly identifies countries with strategic deficiencies in their AML/CFT regimes (i.e., in their policies to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism). How much gray-listing affects a country’s capital flows is of interest to policy makers, investors, and the Fund. This paper estimates the magnitude of the effect using an inferential machine learning technique. It finds that gray-listing results in a large and statistically significant reduction in capital inflows.
International Monetary Fund. Strategy, Policy, & Review Department
The IMF’s Vulnerability Exercise (VE) is a cross-country exercise that identifies country-specific near-term macroeconomic risks. As a key element of the Fund’s broader risk architecture, the VE is a bottom-up, multi-sectoral approach to risk assessments for all IMF member countries. The VE modeling toolkit is regularly updated in response to global economic developments and the latest modeling innovations. The new generation of VE models presented here leverages machine-learning algorithms. The models can better capture interactions between different parts of the economy and non-linear relationships that are not well measured in ”normal times.” The performance of machine-learning-based models is evaluated against more conventional models in a horse-race format. The paper also presents direct, transparent methods for communicating model results.
International Monetary Fund
Diversification of the GCC economies, supported by greater openness to trade and higher foreign investment, can have a large impact on growth. Such measures can support higher, sustained, and more inclusive growth by improving the allocation of resources across sectors and producers, creating jobs, triggering technology spillovers, promoting knowledge, creating a more competitive business environment, and enhancing productivity. The GCC countries are open to trade, but much less so to foreign direct investment (FDI). GCC foreign trade has been expanding robustly, but FDI inflows have stalled in recent years despite policy efforts taken to reduce administrative barriers and provide incentives to attract FDI. Tariffs are relatively low; however, a number of non-tariff barriers to trade persist and there are substantial restrictions on foreign ownership of businesses and real estate. The growth impact of closing export and FDI gaps could be significant. In most countries, the biggest boost to growth would come from closing the FDI gap—up to one percentage point increase in real non-oil per capita GDP growth. Closing export gaps could provide an additional growth dividend in the range of 0.2-0.5 percentage point. Boosting non-oil exports and attracting more FDI requires a supportive policy environment. Policy priorities are to upgrade human capital, increase productivity and competitiveness, improve the business climate, and reduce remaining barriers to foreign trade and investment. Specifically, continued reforms in the following areas will be important: • Human capital development: continue with investments made to raise educational quality to provide knowledge and skills upgrade. • Labor market reforms: aim to improve productivity and boost competitiveness of the non-oil economy. • Legal frameworks: ensure predictability and protection; efforts should include enhancing minority investor protection and dispute resolution; implementing anti-bribery and integrity measures. • Business climate reforms: focus on further liberalizing foreign ownership regulations and strengthening corporate governance; and on further reducing non-tariff trade barriers by streamlining and automating border procedures and streamlining administrative processes for issuing permits.
International Monetary Fund
In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.
International Monetary Fund
In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.
Mr. Bassem M Kamar
and
Samy Ben Naceur
Coordinating macroeconomic policies is a pre-requisite to a successful launch of the common currency in the GCC countries. Relying on the Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate approach as a theoretical framework, we apply the Pooled Mean Group methodology to determine the similarity of the impact of a selected set of macroeconomic indicators on the real exchange rate in each country. Our empirical evidence points to a clear coordination of monetary policy, fiscal policy, government consumption, and openness across the member countries. While RER misalignments also show a substantial convergence building over time, differences in the misalignments of the two polar cases remain rather substantial, calling for further coordination and policy harmonization.
Mr. R. G Gelos
,
Mr. Guido M Sandleris
, and
Ms. Ratna Sahay
What determines the ability of governments from developing countries to access international credit markets? We examine this question using detailed data on sovereign bond issuances and public syndicated bank loans since 1982. We find that traditional measures of a country’s links with the rest of the world (such as trade openness) and traditional liquidity and macroeconomic indicators do not help much in explaining market access. However, a country’s vulnerability to shocks and the perceived quality of its policies and institutions appear to be important determinants of its government’s ability to tap the markets. We are unable to detect strong punishment of defaulting countries by credit markets.