The loss of a loved one changes your life forever. Your life hits rock-bottom and loses its meaning. The future looks bleak and moving forward, a challenge. Who knows it better than me, a mother, who lost her son? What did I do to rebuild my life? How do many others who face the loss of a loved one, find meaning in their life? I share in this book, my journey, struggles, minor victories and all the things that helped me grow and strengthen with the intent that it will help others to walk through their journey and move forward in life with renewed purpose, love and peace in their hearts. "The book feels really valuable. It is quite well researched too, regarding grief and how to come out of it. Having made that journey, it comes from your heart". – Renu Viswanath, Ex-Headmistress, The Mother’s International School

Like other fragile sub-Saharan African countries, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are seeking to harness their natural resource potential in the context of ambitious development strategies. This study investigates options for scaling up public investment and expanding social safety nets in a general equilibrium setting. First, it assesses the macro-fiscal implications of alternative fiscal rules for public investment, and, second, it explicitly accounts for redistribution through direct cash transfers. Results show that a sustainable non-resource deficit target is robust to the high uncertainty of resources output and prices, while delivering growth benefits through higher public investment. The scaling-up magnitudes, however, depend on the size of projected resource revenue and absorptive capacity. Adding a social transfer raises private consumption, suggesting that a fraction of the resource revenue could be used to expand safety nets.

With public debt soaring across the world, a growing concern is whether current debt levels are a harbinger of fiscal crises, thereby restricting the policy space in a downturn. The empirical evidence to date is however inconclusive, and the true cost of debt may be overstated if interest rates remain low. To shed light into this debate, this paper re-examines the importance of public debt as a leading indicator of fiscal crises using machine learning techniques to account for complex interactions previously ignored in the literature. We find that public debt is the most important predictor of crises, showing strong non-linearities. Moreover, beyond certain debt levels, the likelihood of crises increases sharply regardless of the interest-growth differential. Our analysis also reveals that the interactions of public debt with inflation and external imbalances can be as important as debt levels. These results, while not necessarily implying causality, show governments should be wary of high public debt even when borrowing costs seem low.

This paper seeks to guide the reform of fiscal frameworks in Asia-Pacific in the context of calls for a more active fiscal policy in a shock-prone world. It highlights that the cost of fiscal support is large and that fiscal frameworks, including fiscal rules, are being put to the test given the sharp increase in debt, high interest and weaker growth prospects. The stress is only compounded by long-term challenges like aging populations, climate change and the need to deliver on the sustainable development goals. In this context, it is timely to review the effectiveness of fiscal policy in Asia-Pacific and seek for ways to strengthen fiscal frameworks. After the global financial crisis, fiscal policy in Asia-Pacific became more countercylical and stronger than in other regions—especially in advanced economies. The paper shows that the degree of countercyclicality has been asymetric, with larger responses during periods of weak growth, and in particular in response to large shocks—the global financial crisis and the pandemic. It highlights that responses to the pandemic were large and used a wide range of tools, and how fiscal and monetary policy complemented each as they responded to large shocks. It looks into the deterioration of debt dynamics in Asia-Pacific, as public debt has been rising persistently across most countries driven by declining growth and rising deficits—particualrly after the global financial crisis for advanced economies and after the pandemic for emerging market and low income countries. The paper reviews fiscal frameworks across Asia-Pacific, including the use of fiscal rules, medium-term fiscal frameworks, and fiscal councils. It describes the characteristics of fiscal rules, which usually focus on debt and budget balances and are set by law but tend to lack well-specified enforcement mechanism or escape clauses. It highlights that compliance with the rules has worsened following the pandemic as—in contrast with the outturns before the pandemic--Asia-Pacific countries tend to show larger deviations relative to other regions. It also shows that despite the increase adoption of medium-term fiscal frameworks in Asia-Pacific forward guidance has been hampered by the lack of binding targets and ex-post analysis. Moreover, they do not seem to have resulted in better macro-fiscal forecast in part due to weak capacity and enforcement, lack of integration with the annual budget, and exposure to shocks—with risk analysis mostly limited to qualitative discussions. Proposed reforms seek to implement a comprehensive, risk-based approach to public finances. They focus on strengthening the medium-term orientation of fiscal policy through credible medium-term fiscal plans, fiscal rules linked to the medium-term strategy and the annual budgets, and a stronger reliance on fiscal councils. They also emphasize the need for a broader view of the public sector as fiscal policy is being conducted through multiple channels, which requires assessing and managing vulnerabilities and a significant improvement in fiscal statistics. They also address aging and climate change by focusing on assessing large intergenerational trade-offs, reporting on long-term debt dynamics, and on green medium-term fiscal frameworks that incorporate the effects of climate change and climate policies.

We develop a simple semistructural model for the Rwandan economy to better understand the monetary policy transmission mechanism. A key feature of the model is the introduction of a modified uncovered interest parity condition to capture key structural features of Rwanda’s economy and policy framework, such as the limited degree of capital mobility. A filtration of the observed data through the model allows us to illustrate the contribution of various factors to inflation dynamics and its deviations from the inflation target. Our results, consistent with evidence for other countries in the region, suggest that food and oil prices as well as the exchange rate have accounted for the bulk of inflation dynamics in Rwanda.

Some resource-rich developing countries are in the process of harnessing immense mining resources towards inclusive growth and prosperity. Nevertheless, tapping into natural resources could be challenging given the large front-loaded investment, volatile capital flows and exposure to global commodity markets. Public investment is needed to remove the often-large infrastructure gap and unlock the economic potential. However, too rapid fiscal outlays could push the economy to its limit of absorptive capacity and increase macro-financial vulnerabilities. This paper utilizes a structural model-based approach to analyze macroeconomic impacts of different public investment strategies on key fiscal and non-fiscal variables such as debt, consumption, sovereign wealth fund, and real exchange rates. We apply the model to Mongolia and draw policy recommendations from the analysis. We find that fiscal policy adjustment, particularly moderating infrastructure investment and optimizing investment efficiency is needed to maintain macroeconomic and external stability, as well as to boost the long-term sustainable growth for Mongolia.

This paper outlines the key features of the production version of the quarterly projection model (QPM), which is a forward-looking open-economy gap model, calibrated to represent the Indian case, for generating forecasts and risk assessment as well as conducting policy analysis. QPM incorporates several India-specific features like the importance of the agricultural sector and food prices in the inflation process; features of monetary policy transmission and implications of an endogenous credibility process for monetary policy formulation. The paper also describes key properties and historical decompositions of some important macroeconomic variables.

God hands over the magical key to the boy in trouble. This key takes him from one door to another on his wish like a magic. It leads to new problems and new consequences which changes the world of everyone around. Will the boy step up to change his life or would he lead his normal one Feel the charisma and the passion. Get ready to experience a new world that will take you to a ride of your lifetime. What is going to happen next.