Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has further dampened the economic prospects for developing countries in east Asia and the Pacific, meaning lower economic growth and higher poverty in the region this year, the World Bank has warned.The Ukraine factor came on top of the existing risks that the region – home to 2.1 billion people and stretching from China to Papua New Guinea – has been facing in recent years.

The Ukraine war has major economic consequences for energy, food, inflation and poverty, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The EBRD's chief economist, Beata Javorcik, spoke to AFP about the fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, from where more than three million refugees have fled so far.Global lenders are giving billions for Ukraine, including a two-billion-euro (US$2.2 billion) "resilience package" from the London-bas

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to cause more disruption to the global food system by dramatically increasing the cost of staple foods and the energy required to transport them.

The world economy's fragile recovery from the COVID-induced crisis is now threatened by Russia's war in Ukraine and soaring commodity prices.Here are four questions regarding the risks to global gross domestic product (GDP):Will Growth Stall? "The war happened right at a time when Europe and the United States (US) had a recovery that was going really well. Projections in Europe were among the highest ...

The world's biggest economies are committed to taking a careful approach to unwinding support introduced during the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia said Friday at a meeting of G20 finance chiefs.Some central banks, including in the United States (US), are moving towards hiking rates and withdrawing stimulus as economies rebound strongly from COVID-induced downturns and inflation surges.But there are concerns that aggressive policy tightening could knock a fragile recovery off course, and

After the turmoil of the past two years, the consensus among economic pundits is that 2022 will be calmer. But in late 2019, when the first reports of a new coronavirus started to filter out from Wuhan in China, few imagined within months that the world economy would be flattened by a pandemic.

Last year, I lost my teacher, friend, and most valued research colleague, and the world lost a brilliant economist. Richard Cooper was one of my supervisors when I was pursuing my Ph.D. at Yale. As a doctoral candidate, I benefited from a veritable “dream team” of economists, each of whom enriched my life and work tremendously. James Tobin pushed me towards deep and creative insights with empirical relevance. Edmund Phelps sharpened my analytical skills.

The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects (GEP) report, published twice a year, is the most important source for evaluating the current and future outlook for emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs). The recently released June edition is especially significant because of the warnings it contains. Someone reading this report too quickly could easily miss the bad news, because, as with all publications by international organizations, it comes sugar-coated.

In my previous commentaries on the peculiar world of equity markets in 2020, I offered a bullish outlook for how events would unfold as the year progressed (with all due caveats for the market’s overall unpredictability). In the event, things have broadly played out as I anticipated, owing to a remarkable monetary – and fiscal-policy expansion and the timely arrival of vaccines that appear capable of ending this dreadful pandemic. What can we expect in 2021?

The next few months will tell us a lot about the shape of the coming global recovery. Despite ebullient stock markets, uncertainty about COVID-19 remains pervasive. Regardless of the pandemic’s course, therefore, the world’s struggle with the virus so far is likely to affect growth, employment, and politics for a very long time. Let’s start with the possible good news.