Publications

Services Trade and Employment

| 7 June 2015
Trade, Discussion Notes | Tags: Employment, Global Value Chains, Services Trade
Driven by spectacular technological advances and the emergence and intensification of global value chains, trade in services has been the most dynamic part of global trade over recent years. All regions of the world have witnessed growth in services trade, albeit at different paces. Europe ... continue reading

Monetary Policy and Sustainability. The Case of Bangladesh

and | 31 May 2015
Monetary, Discussion Notes | Tags: Employment, Energy, Financial Inclusion
Central banks have wide ranging effects on the economy and society as a whole. Their decisions on monetary policy and sustainability are closely intertwined. Nonetheless, the links between the mandates, objectives and instruments of central banks and a broad sustainability agenda are rarely reflected in ... continue reading

Where Will All The Jobs Come From?

| 24 April 2015
Trade, Blog | Tags: Employment, Global Value Chains, Services Trade
In the last couple of years, a spate of magazines, articles and think-pieces have predicted a new age of automation (and robots) – one that means an increasingly stark picture for labour worldwide (see the BBC and The Economist). Even Barack Obama has been seen ... continue reading

Central Banks, Financial Stability and Inequality

| 9 March 2015
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Central Banks, Financial Stability, Inequality
When you ask a central banker what her job is, she will most probably answer: “keeping inflation under control!” Indeed, securing price stability constitutes the current raison d’être of most, if not all, central banks around the world. In parallel to this objective, however, many ... continue reading

Should the ECB Helicopter Adjust Its Dropping Zone?

| 4 February 2015
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Inequality, QE
“Let us suppose that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1000 in bills from the sky…” This pleasant image conveyed by Milton Friedman’s famous metaphor is taken to new heights by Mario Draghi, who promised to inject €60 billion ... continue reading

Inside CETA: Unpacking the EU-Canada free trade deal

| 12 December 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Employment, Environment, ISDS, Subsidies
How are sustainable development objectives treated in the latest major preferential trade agreements?  In late September, the European Union and Canada released the long-awaited text of a bilateral free trade pact, five years after launching talks, and almost one year on from announcing they had ... continue reading

Monetary Policy and Inequality – What Do Central Bankers Say?

| 24 November 2014
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Central Banks, Inequality
“Benign neglect” perhaps most aptly characterizes the attitude that central bankers have traditionally displayed toward the topic of economic inequality. Indeed, monetary policy and inequality have long been regarded as having nothing more in common than just the fact that they both coexist. In the ... continue reading

At Whose Service? Jobs and Services Trade in Developing Countries

| 17 November 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Development, Employment, Poverty, Services Trade, WTO
Services-led Employment Growth? Creating jobs to match their ever increasing, relatively young labor forces is probably the biggest challenge that developing countries are facing in the medium term. Reducing unemployment is perhaps the most effective tool to achieve a wide range of development goals, such ... continue reading

Does Unconventional Monetary Policy Affect Inequality? Evidence from Japan

and | 17 October 2014
Monetary, Research Papers | Tags: Inequality, QE
Inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy, but is gaining more attention recently. Here, we exclusively focus on the impact of unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on inequality. We look at how the recent UMP in Japan affected inequality, using ... continue reading

Asia’s Poor Increase by One-Billion Overnight

| 16 September 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: G20, IMF, Poverty, Trade, WTO
The news has been exceptionally bad recently: carnage in the Middle East, race riots in the US, ongoing recession in the Eurozone and Japan, tension in the South China Sea, high youth unemployment virtually everywhere, the Ebola epidemic and so on and so depressingly forth. ... continue reading