Analytical Corner at Spring Meetings

An interesting new feature of Spring Meetings of World Bank Group and IMF appears to be the Analytical Corner series where staff of Fund discuss working papers and research.

Here is a collection of them from this year’s Spring Meetings and more.

What should a country do to diversify its exports? Our analysis points to (in order of importance) accumulating human capital, lowering trade barriers, improving institutions and infrastructures. For commodity exporters, reducing trade barriers is key, followed by improving secondary education and financial sector development.

Rebasing GDP: Why Has It Become So Popular?

In a growing number low-and middle-income countries, updating GDP estimates has led to significant revisions. Governments often welcome these changes because they, seemingly overnight, reduce debt-to-GDP ratios and increase GDP per-capita. But is this real? Why does this happen and what are the down sides? Join us to learn why rebasing is important, what the key ingredients to a successful update are, and important lessons for building capacity in this area.

Public-Private Partnerships: Managing Fiscal Impact in Limited Capacity Countries

Around the world, countries are increasingly considering public-private partnerships (PPPs) to build and maintain infrastructure. But what are the fiscal challenges associated with PPPs? Join us to hear the Caribbean experience and learn how countries that face capacity constraints can manage fiscal risks and reap the benefits of PPPs.

Building Cyber-Resilience in the Financial Sector

Given frequent and sophisticated attacks on financial institutions, how can governments improve cyber-resilience and financial stability while reducing the threat of a cyber-attack contagion? Join us to learn how the IMF brings experts, policymakers and the private sector together to help financial supervisors in developing economies undertake better quality regulation and supervision of cyber risk.

Analytical Corner: Fighting Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs)

Large illegal and opaque transfers of capital can have a major impact on the economic stability of a country and the broader global financial system. For example, they can drain foreign exchange reserves, lower tax receipts and reduce government revenue. Over the last two decades, IFFs have been the focus of increasing global concern and the IMF has been playing a key role in international efforts to combat these opaque and often destabilizing transfers of capital. This session will present the latest developments in staff’s work on this topic, including from an AML/CFT, tax and statistics perspectives.

Financial Sector Stability: Tools to Strengthen Reforms in Emerging Markets and Developing Countries

How can policymakers implement a strong reform agenda? Join us to learn how countries such as Uganda are using targeted tools like the Financial Sector Stability Review, so they can prioritize reforms and build a more resilient financial sector.

Analytical Corner: The Influence of Macroprudential Policies on Household Spending and Credit -Lessons Learned

As macroprudential policies gain prominence around the world, it becomes increasingly important to understand how they work. To better understand, we introduce an integrated macroprudential policy (iMaPP) database. The analysis of loan-to-value limits on household credit and consumption is one example of how better data can help us make progress.

Analytical Corner: Illuminating Economic Growth: Tapping Big Data to Improve Growth Information

This innovative work seeks to understand the uncertainty in official real GDP measures through the lens of satellite imagery data. Using satellite-recorded nighttime lights, we estimate the measurement errors in official real GDP per capita data and construct more robust measures. This work is important as it provides an opportunity to overcome the challenges of a weak statistical system and/or large informal sectors in low income countries, tapping into the wealth of big data.

Analytical Corner: Automation as an Offset to Aging? Japan’s Shrinking Labor Force and Rise of the Robots

Rapid advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are making inroads in the workplace — augmenting and sometimes replacing human labor, raising concern over the impact on economic and social outcomes. Japan’s experience suggests effects will vary across countries, but policies that best harness automation may be similar.

Analytical Corner: Scaling up Access to Credit for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in the Middle East and Central Asia

SME financial inclusion is key to support economic growth and job creation. The talk will address these potential gains, which are particularly large in Middle East and Central Asia countries; and discuss the most effective policy approaches to scale up SME finance in a meaningful, safe and sustainable way.

Analytical Corner: The World Uncertainty Index

This session will present a new measure of global uncertainty — The World Uncertainty Index. It will start by discussing why uncertainty matters, followed by how the World Uncertainty Index is constructed, what it looks like, how it compares to existing measures of uncertainty, and how it varies across countries and time.

Analytical Corner: Central Bank Governance: Emerging Best Practices

This presentation will highlight the importance of central banks’ governance arrangements and explain the key pillars that underpin them: decision-making structures, autonomy, accountability and transparency. Building on staff’s experience under the IMF safeguards policy, the presentation will share the evolution of central bank governance and the best practices that have emerged in the last decade.

Analytical Corner: Rising Corporate Market Power and its Macroeconomic Effects

Public debate about rising corporate market power is mounting, amid sluggish economic growth and stagnant incomes for most workers during the past decade in advanced economies. Is there any connection between the two? This presentation tackles this question and aims to gauge market power trends and assess their macroeconomic implications.

Analytical Corner: A Machine Learning Approach to Forecasting GDP

When we estimate GDP for lower income countries, we usually have a constraint of both data quality and data sparsity. What should we do to solve such a problem? Machine learning techniques together with alternative data sources are used here to have a nowcasting model for lower income countries.

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