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Social Science > Demography

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 86 items for :

  • Type: Journal Issue x
  • Fiscal Policy x
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Cover IMF Working Papers
Navigating Minefields and Headwinds: National Security, Demographic Shifts, Climate Change and Fiscal Policy in Lithuania
Serhan Cevik
Lithuania’s immediate fiscal challenges are national security and higher costs of borrowing, but fiscal prospects are further exacerbated by long-term pressures stemming from climate change and a shrinking and aging population. The country has experienced a rapidly decreasing population—from 3.7 million in 1991 to 2.8 million in 2023—and its old-age dependency ratio is consequently expected to increase from 33 percent in 2023 to 53.4 percent by 2050. The resulting long-term spending pressures are projected to amount to as much as 11.2 percent of GDP, which is about 30 percent of the current level of spending. Debt sustainability concerns would not allow financing additional spending with more debt. Hence, a comprehensive strategy will help address these long-term fiscal challenges, including tax policy changes to raise additional revenue while primarily reducing expenditure needs through pension and healthcare reforms.
Keywords:
Military spending; interest rates; climate change; demographics; pension; healthcare; tax policy; fiscal sustainability; Lithuania; debt sustainability concern; dependency ratio; headwinds national security; spending pressure; old-age dependency ratio; Aging; Pension spending; Global; Europe
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
South Africa: Post-Financing Assessment-Press Release; and Staff Report
International Monetary Fund. African Dept.
This paper presents South Africa’s Post-Financing Assessment report. The new government of national unity that took office in June faces significant challenges, including declining real per capita growth, high unemployment, poverty, and inequality, and a rising level of public debt. The new administration has committed to address these challenges by continuing ongoing structural reforms aimed at addressing supply constraints and bolstering inclusive growth, while maintaining fiscal discipline. Monetary policy should carefully manage the descent of inflation to the mid-point of the target range and stay data dependent. The report recommends that policies should focus on bolstering inclusive growth and restoring fiscal sustainability, while managing the descent of inflation to target and safeguarding financial stability. Monetary policy should stay data dependent and rate cuts be considered only after inflation declines sustainably toward the midpoint of the target range. The authorities should continue to monitor financial sector risks, including those related to the bank-sovereign nexus, and enhance supervision and prudential regulations.
Keywords:
U.S. dollar; inflation decline; government operation; per-capita GDP figure; Policy discussion; IMF's transparency policy; IMF team; Fiscal stance; Africa; Global
Cover Gender Notes
Promoting Gender Equality and Tackling Demographic Challenges
Jaijai Gu
,
Lisa L Kolovich
,
Jorge Mondragon
,
Monique Newiak
, and
Michael Herrmann
Two broad contrasting demographic trends present challenges for economies globally: countries with aging populations, often advanced economies and increasingly emerging markets, anticipate a significant shrinking of the labor force, with implications for growth, economic stability, and public finances. Economies with rapidly growing populations, as is the case in many low-income and developing countries, will face a burgeoning young population entering the labor market in the next decades—a large potential to reap the demographic dividend if the right skills and economic and social conditions are in place. This note highlights how gender equality, in both cases, can serve as a stabilizing factor to rebalance demographic trends. As decisions regarding fertility, human capital investment, and labor force participation are interlinked, policies should aim at relaxing households’ time and resource constraints that condition these choices. This means that, in general, in advanced economies and emerging markets, policies should facilitate women’s work–life choices and boost female participation in the labor market, whereas policies in low-income and developing countries should focus on reforms that narrow gender gaps in opportunities and support human capital accumulation.
Keywords:
Demographics; fertility; female labor force participation; gender equality; education; human capital; macroeconomic policy; IMF gender note; labor force participation; IMF Library; IMF gender Note 2024/002; tackling demographic challenge; Gender diversity; Women; Labor force participation; Gender inequality; Global; Middle East; Sub-Saharan Africa; Western Hemisphere; North Africa
Cover IMF Working Papers
Political Fragility: Coups d’État and Their Drivers
Aliona Cebotari
,
Enrique Chueca-Montuenga
,
Yoro Diallo
,
Yunsheng Ma
,
Rima A Turk
,
Weining Xin
, and
Harold Zavarce
The paper explores the drivers of political fragility by focusing on coups d’état as symptomatic of such fragility. It uses event studies to identify factors that exhibit significantly different dynamics in the runup to coups, and machine learning to identify these stressors and more structural determinants of fragility—as well as their nonlinear interactions—that create an environment propitious to coups. The paper finds that the destabilization of a country’s economic, political or security environment—such as low growth, high inflation, weak external positions, political instability and conflict—set the stage for a higher likelihood of coups, with overlapping stressors amplifying each other. These stressors are more likely to lead to breakdowns in political systems when demographic pressures and underlying structural weaknesses (especially poverty, exclusion, and weak governance) are present or when policies are weaker, through complex interactions. Conversely, strengthened fundamentals and macropolicies have higher returns in structurally fragile environments in terms of staving off political breakdowns, suggesting that continued engagement by multilateral institutions and donors in fragile situations is likely to yield particularly high dividends. The model performs well in predicting coups out of sample, having predicted a high probability of most 2020-23 coups, including in the Sahel region.
Keywords:
Fragility; Drivers of Fragility; Coup d’État; Machine Learning; coup dynamics; event study result; coup probability; probability of coup; IMF working paper 24/34; Fiscal stance; Income; Sub-Saharan Africa; Middle East and Central Asia; Caribbean
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Belgium: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
This Selected Issues paper explores different aspects of fiscal consolidation in Belgium. Belgium is facing higher structural deficits and rising debt after the pandemic and energy crisis. Fiscal consolidation is needed to lower inflation, rebuild buffers, reduce debt, and preserve Belgium’s social contract. Comparisons with peers show that rationalizing and increasing the efficiency of social benefits and the public wage bill would need to be at the core of the consolidation effort. All federal entities should share the burden of the adjustment, in a coordinated manner, with accountability at all levels of government, and within a credible and clear multi-year consolidation plan. Comprehensive spending reviews would help target budgetary saving. In order to mitigate the growth impact in the near term and boost potential growth, public investment should be preserved, and the adjustment should go together with structural reforms to increase labor force participation and productivity.
Keywords:
state government expenditure; health efficiency frontier; cost of aging; major spending category; healthcare expenditure; Aging; Pension spending; Pensions; Fiscal consolidation; Europe; Global
Cover Selected Issues Papers
Spending Efficiency and Reforms: France
Iulia Ruxandra Teodoru
and
Ruud Vermeulen
To rebuild fiscal buffers after large fiscal responses to successive shocks over 2020-22, France will need to reverse the trend spending increase observed over the last three decades through structural spending reforms. This paper identifies areas where scope for savings or efficiency gains exist based on an evaluation of the level and efficiency of public spending in France relative to European peers, using benchmarking analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to derive efficiency frontiers. Reforming social protection, health, education, and civil service, and rationalizing tax expenditures should preserve or improve outcomes while generating savings that would help meet medium-term adjustment needs.
Keywords:
Public Expenditure; Efficiency; Fiscal Consolidation; Fiscal Policy; France; efficiency frontier; efficiency gain; frontier analysis; IMF staff calculation; spending gap; Tax expenditures; Aging; Europe; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Estimating the Employment and GDP Multiplier of Emergency Cash Transfers in Brazil
Daniel Cunha
,
Ms. Joana Pereira
,
Roberto Accioly Perrelli
, and
Mr. Frederik G Toscani
We estimate the subnational employment and GDP multiplier of Brazil's 2020 federal cash transfers to vulnerable households. Using two-stage least squares regressions we estimate a formal employment multiplier and then apply an analytical transformation to recover an implied GDP multiplier in the range of 0.5-1.5. The lower bound of this range lies below most estimates in the literature, which may result from the exceptional constraints imposed by the pandemic on supply chains and consumption. Nevertheless, even using the lower end of our range implies that federal cash transfers played an important role in supporting employment and GDP.
Keywords:
Fiscal multipliers; Household cash transfers; Labor informality; GDP multiplier; employment multiplier; household cash transfer; multiplier of emergency cash transfer; cash transfer program; Employment; Informal employment; Public employment; COVID-19
Cover IMF Working Papers
Reforming the Greek Pension System
Mr. Alvar Kangur
,
Niki Kalavrezou
, and
Mr. Daehaeng Kim
The Greek pension system has been costly, complex, and distortive, which has contributed to Greece’s fiscal problems and discouraged labor force participation. Several attempts to reform the system faltered due to lack of implementation, pushback by vested interests, and court rulings leading to reversals. A series of reforms introduced throughout 2015–17 unified benefit and contribution rules, removed several distortions and reduced fragmentation and costs. If fully implemented throughout the long-term, these reforms can go a long way towards enhancing the pension system affordability. However, reforms faced setbacks and fell short of creating stronger incentives to build long contribution histories, to deliver sustainable growth by improving the fiscal policy mix, and to ensure fairness and equitable burden sharing across generations and interest groups. Policy priorities should aim towards fully implementing the 2015–17 reforms and complementing them with additional reforms to address these remaining objectives.
Keywords:
pension reform; labor market incentives; fiscal consolidation.; policy priority; pension system affordability; reform objective; Policy recommendation; pension system; Pension spending; Pensions; Aging; Retirement; Wages; Europe
Cover IMF Working Papers
Initial Output Losses from the Covid-19 Pandemic: Robust Determinants
Davide Furceri
and
Mr. Jonathan David Ostry
While the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all countries, output losses vary considerably across countries. We provide a first analysis of robust determinants of observed initial output losses using model-averaging techniques—Weighted Average Least Squares and Bayesian Model Averaging. The results suggest that countries that experienced larger output losses are those with lower GDP per capita, more stringent containment measures, higher deaths per capita, higher tourism dependence, more liberalized financial markets, higher pre-crisis growth, lower fiscal stimulus, higher ethnic and religious fractionalization and more democratic regimes. With respect to the first factor, lower resilience of poorer countries reflects the higher economic costs of containment measures and deaths in such countries and less effective fiscal and monetary policy stimulus.
Keywords:
Recession; Resilience; WALS; BMA; Model-Averaging.; WP; output performance; output loss; credit market regulation; containment measure; product market regulation
Cover IMF Working Papers
Demographic Transition and Pension Reforms: Adding Demographics to GIMF
Benjamin Carton
,
Emilio Fernández Corugedo
,
Mr. Benjamin L Hunt
, and
Simon Voigts
The Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF) is a multi-region, forward-looking, DSGE model developed at the International Monetary Fund for policy analysis and international economic research. This paper documents the incorporation of demographic features into the model. The analysis presented illustrates how these new features enable the model to estimate some of the macroeconomic consequences of changing demographics.
Keywords:
WP; demographics; dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models; macroeconomic interdependence; exchange rate; central bank; risk premium; trade balance; labor market; OLG household; nominal interest rate; market rate of interest; capital stock; GIMF model; rate of return; lending rate; Aging; Population growth; Demographic change; Global; consumption function; spillover effect; world real interest rate; net impact; substitution effect; wealth effect; fiscal policy question