Corruption is macro-relevant for many countries, but is often hidden, making measurement of it—and its effects—inherently difficult. Existing indicators suffer from several weaknesses, including a lack of time variation due to the sticky nature of perception-based measures, reliance on a limited pool of experts, and an inability to distinguish between corruption and institutional capacity gaps. This paper attempts to address these limitations by leveraging news media coverage of corruption. We contribute to the literature by constructing the first big data, cross-country news flow indices of corruption (NIC) and anti-corruption (anti-NIC) by running country-specific search algorithms over more than 665 million international news articles. These indices correlate well with existing measures of corruption but offer additional richness in their time-series variation. Drawing on theory from the corporate finance and behavioral economics literature, we also test to what extent news about corruption and anti-corruption efforts affects economic agents’ assessments of corruption and, in turn, economic outcomes. We find that NIC shocks appear to negatively impact both financial (e.g., stock market returns and yield spreads) and real variables (e.g., growth), albeit with some country heterogeneity. On average, NIC shocks lower real per capita GDP growth by 3 percentage points over a two-year period, illustrating persistence in the effect of such shocks. Conversely, there is suggestive evidence that anti-NIC efforts appear to have a sustained positive macro impact only when paired with meaningful institutional strengthening, proxied by capacity development efforts.

In this paper, we consider incidences of arrears to the IMF, focusing on protracted arrears cases and attempt to identify determinants of their occurrence. We use narrative and formal methods. In addition, we analyze determinants of the duration of arrears. We find that previous arrears, reserves coverage, and institutional quality are among the main determinants of arrears. In addition, we identify a role for political developments, including civil unrest, which make arrears more likely to arise and to last longer. We conclude that improved macroeconomic conditions and turnaround of political fortunes would help to clear the currently remaining protracted arrears cases.

We present cross-country evidence on the impact of remittances on labor market outcomes. Remittances appear to have a strong impact on both labor supply and labor demand in recipient countries. These effects are highly significant and greater in size than those of foreign direct investment or offcial development aid. On the supply side, remittances reduce labor force participation and increase informality of the labor market. In addition, male and female labor supply show significantly different sensitivities to remittances. On the demand side, remittances reduce overall unemployment but benefit mostly lower-wage, lowerproductivity nontradables industries at the expense of high-productivity, high-wage tradables sectors. As a consequence, even though inequality declines as a result of larger remittances, average wage and productivity growth declines, the latter more strongly than the former leading to an increase in the labor income share. In fragile states, in contrast, remittances impose a positive externality, possibly because the tradables sector tends to be underdeveloped. Our findings indicate that reforms to foster inclusive growth need to take into account the role of remittances in order to be successful.

Despite welfare and poverty-reducing benefits for recipient households, remittance inflows have been shown to entail macroeconomic challenges; producing Dutch Disease-type effects through their upward (appreciation) pressure on real exchange rates, reducing the quality of institutions, delaying fiscal adjustment, and ultimately having an indeterminate effect on long-run growth. The paper explores an additional challenge, for monetary policy. Although they expand bank balance sheets, providing a stable flow of interest-insensitive funding, remittances tend to increase banks’ holdings of liquid assets. This both reduces the need for an interbank market and severs the link between the policy rate and banks’ marginal costs of funds, thus shutting down a major transmission channel. We develop a stylized model based on asymmetric information and a lack of transparent borrowers and undertake econometric analysis providing evidence that increased remittance inflows are associated with a weaker transmission. As independent monetary policy becomes impaired, this result is consistent with earlier findings that recipient countries tend to favor fixed exchange rate regimes.

After decades of high growth, the Chinese economy is facing headwinds from slowing productivity growth and a declining workforce that are projected to lower potential growth substantially in the longer term. We project China’s potential growth over the medium to long term, showing that potential growth could slow to around 3.8 percent on average between 2025-30 and to around 2.8 percent on average over 2031-40 in the absence of major reforms. We present a reform scenario with structural reforms to lift productivity growth and rebalancing China’s growth towards more consumption, that would help China transition to “high-quality”—balanced, inclusive, and green—growth. We use production function and general equilibrium modelling approaches to show that potential growth could remain at around 4.3 percent between 2025-40 under the reform scenario.

Asian countries have high demand for U.S. dollars and are sensitive to U.S. dollar funding costs. An important, but often overlooked, component of these costs is the basis spread in the cross-currency swap market that emerges when there are deviations from covered interest parity (CIP). CIP deviations mean that investors need to pay a premium to borrow U.S. dollars or other currencies on a hedged basis via cross-currency swap markets. These deviations can be explained by regulatory changes since the global financial crisis, which have limited arbitrage opportunities and country-specific factors that contribute to a mismatch in the demand and supply of U.S. dollars. We find that an increase in the basis spread tightens financial conditions in net debtor countries, while easing financial conditions in net creditor countries. The main reason is that net debtor countries are, in general, unable to substitute smoothly to other domestic funding channels. Policies that promote reliable alternative funding sources, such as long-term corporate bond market or stable long-term investors, including a “hedging counterpart of last resort,” can help stabilize financial intermediation when U.S. dollar funding markets come under stress.

The paper intends to highlight challenges in Asian housing markets linked to fast price rises especially in the advanced economies since COVID, and more broadly including many EMs in the period leading up to COVID. It aims to draw policy lessons on how to manage stability aspects through macroprudential and other policies and how to support affordability through structural policies and targeted government support.

Pese a que las remesas aportan ventajas en materia de bienestar y reducción de la pobreza para los hogares receptores, se ha observado que también traen consigo problemas macroeconómicos: producen efecto de tipo mal holandés debido a sus presiones alcistas (apreciación) sobre los tipos de cambio reales, perjudican la calidad de las instituciones, retardan el ajuste fiscal y, en definitiva, tienen un efecto indeterminado en el crecimiento a largo plazo. En este documento se analiza un desafío adicional, que incide sobre la política. Si bien expanden los balances de los bancos al proporcionar un flujo estable de financiamiento que no es sensible a las tasas de interés, las remesas tienden a incrementar las tenencias de activos líquidos de los bancos. Esto reduce la necesidad de un mercado interbancario y al mismo tiempo desarticula el vínculo entre la tasa de política monetaria y el costo marginal de financiamiento de los bancos, cerrando así un importante canal de transmisión. Elaboramos un modelo estilizado basado en información asimétrica y una falta de prestatarios transparentes y realizamos un análisis econométrico que demuestra el aumento de las entradas de remesas está asociado a un debilitamiento de la transmisión. Como la política monetaria independiente se ve vulnerada, este resultado es congruente con observaciones anteriores en las que los países receptores tienden a preferir regímenes de tipo de cambio fijo.