The slowdown in Latin America since 2012 has been accompanied by weak and slightly decelerating potential growth, reflecting sluggish productivity, scarcity of fixed investments and demographic changes. Positive global economic prospects for 2018, the regional cyclical recovery, and policy initiatives to lift productivity are presenting Latin America's leaders with the opportunity to alter that trajectory.
Current technological developments in manufacturing are likely to lead to a partial reversal of the wave of fragmentation and global value chains that was at the core of the rise of North-South trade from 1990 onward. At the same time, China – the main hub of the global-growth-cum-structural-change of that period – may attempt to extend the previous wave through its One Belt, One Road initiative.
It is 2018 and ECON+ is delighted to start the year off with another fantastic conversation with Otaviano Canuto, Executive Director at the World Bank, to continue this series of…
Interactions between access to finance, product innovation, and labor supply are studied in a two-period overlapping generations model with an endogenous skill distribution and financial market imperfections. In the model lack of access to finance (induced by high monitoring costs) has an adverse effect on innovation activity not only directly but also indirectly, because too few individuals may choose to invest in skills. If monitoring costs fall with the number of successful projects, multiple steady states may emerge, one of which defined as a middle-income trap, characterized by low wages in the design sector, a low share of the labor force engaged in innovation activity, and low growth. A sufficiently ambitious policy aimed at alleviating constraints on access to finance by innovators may allow a country to move away from such a trap by promoting the production of ideas and improving incentives to invest in skills.
Central banks of large advanced and many emerging market economies have recently gone through a period of extraordinary expansion of their balance sheets and are all now possibly facing a transition to less abnormal times.
The Mist of Central Bank Balance Sheets Otaviano Canuto | Mon, 24 April 2017 This podcast is performed by Mr. Otaviano Canuto. Central banks of large advanced and many…
APRIL 17, 2017ECON+ brings you an exclusive interview with Otaviano Canuto, Executive Director at the World Bank. Otaviano weighs in on the current role of the World Bank,…
Turkey has been approaching a crossroads for some time now. Soon enough it will have to choose a direction.
Global imbalances have not gone away as an issue, as they reveal that the global economic recovery may have been sub-par because of asymmetric excess surpluses in some countries and output below potential in many others. The end of the “era of global imbalances” may have been called too early. Lord Keynes’ argument about the asymmetry of adjustments between deficit and surplus economies remains stronger than ever.
This collection empirically and conceptually advances our understanding of the intricacies of emerging markets’ financial and macroeconomic development in the post-2008 crisis context. Covering a vast geography and a broad range of economic viewpoints, this study serves as an informed guide in the unchartered waters of fundamental uncertainty as it has been redefined in the post-crisis period. Contributors to the collection go beyond risks-opportunities analyses, looking deeper into the nuanced interpretations of data and economic categories as interplay of developing world characteristics in the context of redefined fundamental uncertainty. Those concerns relate to the issues of small country finance, the industrialization of the developing world, the role of commodity cycles in the global economy, sovereign debt, speculative financial flows and currency pressures, and connections between financial markets and real markets. Compact and comprehensive, this collection offers unique perspectives into contemporary issues of financial deepening and real macroeconomic development in small developing economies that rarely surface in the larger policy and development debates.
Turkey’s economy is at a crossroads, and how the country emerges from the current period of political crisis could dictate its ability to meet its challenges. Will power consolidation and purges render a compromised central bank? Will truculence with major partners such as the EU and Russia lead to deceleration in real-sector growth? Will human rights abuses and risk aversion lead investors to steer clear of Istanbul? And how will a population on edge react to what many expect to be a miserable summer in tourism receipts?
11 August 2016 - Otaviano Canuto The Chinese economy is rebalancing while softening its growth pace. China’s spillovers on the global economy have operated through trade, commodity prices, and…
Emerging market economies (EM) as a special class of financial assets have recently been subject to two competing tales. On the one hand, there is evidence of continued financial deepening and further integration within the global financial system, while the offer of higher yields remains hard to find elsewhere. On the other hand, there are frequent bouts of fear of systemic unwinding of positions triggered by investors “exiting” EM that exhibit signs of weak or unclear macroeconomic foundations.
Capital Finance International, spring 2016 World trade suffered another disappointing year in 2015, experiencing a contraction in merchandise trade volumes during the first half and only a low recovery…
Capital outflows from emerging market economies have substantially accelerated since last year. Some analysts have taken those features as pointing to a high likelihood of a “third wave” of the global financial crisis, this time centered on emerging markets. While arguably their combination may acquire a disorderly nature and materialize systemic risks to those economies as a group – and therefore to the global economy going forward – there are also reasons to expect the significant portfolio rebalancing at play not to lead to a disruptive break.