doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/39665

Person:
Izvorski, Ivailo

Office of the Chief Economist, Europe and Central Asia Region, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Macroeconomics, Public Finance, Corporate Finance

Last updated: January 31, 2025

Biography

Ivailo Izvorski is the Chief Economist for the Europe and Central Asia region. He assumed this position on December 1, 2022. Prior to this, Ivailo was the manager of the Global Debt, Macro and Growth unit. He has worked in technical and managerial positions on the countries of Europe and Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and Africa at the World Bank, the Institute of International Finance, and the IMF. Ivailo holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 13

Greater Heights: Growing to High Income in Europe and Central Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-12) Iacovone, Leonardo; Izvorski, Ivailo; Kostopoulos, Christos; Lokshin, Michael M.; Record, Richard; Torre, Iván; Doczi, Szilvia
Twenty-seven countries have reached high-income status since 1990. Ten of these are in the Europe and Central Asia region and have joined the European Union. Another 20 in the region have become more prosperous since the 1990s. However, their transition to high-income status has been delayed. These middle-income countries have found that the prospects for growth to high-income status have become even more difficult since the 2007–09 global financial crisis. This reflects partly a slowdown in structural reforms at home and partly the challenges associated with a deterioration in the global environment. The concern has emerged that many countries in the region may be caught in the middle-income trap, a phase in development characterized by a recurring deceleration in growth and by per capita incomes that are systematically below the high-income threshold. To ensure that these countries overcome the obstacles to growth and achieve progress toward high-income status, policy makers need to make the transition from a strategy driven largely by investment to a strategy that is supported by the importation and diffusion of global capital, knowledge, and technology and then to a strategy that complements these with innovation. The report Greater Heights: Growing to High Income in Europe and Central Asia relies on the 3i strategy described in World Development Report 2024—investment, infusion, and innovation—to propose policy options to assist middle-income countries in Europe and Central Asia in the effort to reach high-income status. Drawing on comprehensive empirical analysis, the report offers actionable recommendations that will enable policy makers to advance stronger economic growth across the region. Such a transition will require continued and sustained foundational reform to maximize the drivers of economic growth while pivoting to new transformative reforms to promote the development of more complex economic structures and institutions. These involve the need to discipline incumbents, boost the role of the private sector, strengthen the competitive environment, and reward merit. The emphasis on a strategy driven by innovation is also critically important for those countries that have already attained high-income status.
Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Fall 2024: Better Education for Stronger Growth
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-17) Izvorski, Ivailo; Kasyanenko, Sergiy; Lokshin, Michael M.; Torre, Iván
Economic growth in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) is likely to moderate from 3.5 percent in 2023 to 3.3 percent this year. This is significantly weaker than the 4.1 percent average growth in 2000-19. Growth this year is driven by expansionary fiscal policies and strong private consumption. External demand is less favorable because of weak economic expansion in major trading partners, like the European Union. Growth is likely to slow further in 2025, mostly because of the easing of expansion in the Russian Federation and Turkiye. This Europe and Central Asia Economic Update calls for a major overhaul of education systems across the region, particularly higher education, to unleash the talent needed to reinvigorate growth and boost convergence with high-income countries. Universities in the region suffer from poor management, outdated curricula, and inadequate funding and infrastructure. A mismatch between graduates' skills and the skills employers are seeking leads to wasted potential and contributes to the region's brain drain. Reversing the decline in the quality of education will require prioritizing improvements in teacher training, updated curricula, and investment in educational infrastructure. In higher education, reforms are needed to consolidate university systems, integrate them with research centers, and provide reskilling opportunities for adult workers.
Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Fall 2023: Sluggish Growth, Rising Risks
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-05) Kasyanenko, Sergiy; Izvorski, Ivailo; Singer, Dorothe
Europe and Central Asia continues to be negatively impacted by the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, tighter global financial conditions, persistent inflation, and global economic fragmentation. Economic growth in the region is projected to remain weak relative to the long-term trend, delaying the convergence of living standards to those of high-income countries. The impacts of climate change are becoming a serious constraint on growth, as extreme weather events are affecting the region with increased frequency and severity. Economic growth for the emerging market and developing economies of the Europe and Central Asia region has been revised up to 2.4 percent for 2023. The pickup in growth reflects improved forecasts for Ukraine, Central Asia, Türkiye and Russia. Downside risks cloud the outlook. High inflation may persist amid heightened volatility in global commodity markets and a surge in energy prices. Global financial conditions may tighten further. And global growth, already the weakest on record for any five-year period since 1990, may slow further.
Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Spring 2023: Weak Growth, High Inflation, and a Cost-of-Living Crisis
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2023-04-06) Roseman Norfleet, Julia Renee; Izvorski, Ivailo; Lokshin, Michael M.; Singer, Dorothe; Torre, Iván
Economic growth slowed sharply last year in Europe and Central Asia, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a surge in inflation, and the sharp tightening of monetary policy and financing conditions hit private consumption, investment, and trade. The marked increase in food and energy prices boosted inflation to a pace not seen in 20 years. The burden of inflation was spread unevenly across households. The poorest households faced inflation that was more than 2 percentage points higher than the inflation faced by the richest households, with this difference exceeding 5 percentage points in some countries. Poverty and inequality rates derived from household-specific inflation rates differ from those based on the standard consumer price index (CPI) approach. These differences have important policy implications, because many programs use CPI–based inflation adjustments, which do not accurately capture changes in the cost of living of targeted populations. Output growth in the region is projected to remain little changed in 2023 but better than projected in January 2023, largely reflecting upgrades to the pace of expansion in Poland, Russia, and Türkiye.
Assessing Uzbekistan’s Transition: Country Economic Memorandum
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-08) Izvorski, Ivailo; Vatyan, Arman; Trushin, Eskender; Abdul-Hamid, Husein; Dalvit, Nicolo; Safarov, Maksudjon; Iootty, Mariana; Novikova, Marina; Melecky, Martin; Ahmedov, Mohirjon; Manuilova, Natalia; Zorya, Sergiy; Nagaraj, Vinayak; Izvorski, Ivailo; Melecky, Martin
Uzbekistan’s transition from planning to market started almost thirty years ago following its independence from the Soviet Union. For most of this period, economic modernization and transformation were stalled, with little change in institutions and policies from those prevailing at the time of the planned economy. In late 2016, Uzbekistan surprised by launching reforms with a breadth and speed that at times exceeded the pace of those observed in some of the earlier reformers at a similar stage of the process. In November 2018, building on the results from more than a year of economic reforms, the government announced the agenda for the next phase of its bold and ambitious economic transformation. In terms of the pace of transition, Uzbekistan’s record has been mixed but appropriate, given that reforms are dependent on experience with markets and prices, initial conditions, and institutional strength. Before the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic started, the reform momentum was supported by comfortable external and fiscal buffers and a robust global economy. The buffers are still sizable, even with doubling of public debt since 2017, and a sign of strength but the pull from the global economy has been substantially diminished. The rest of the introduction reviews progress in the key areas of economic transformation.
Reinvigorating Growth in Resource-Rich Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09) Izvorski, Ivailo; Coulibaly, Souleymane; Doumbia, Djeneba; Izvorski, Ivailo
The strong economic performance of Sub-Saharan Africa’s resource-rich countries since the start of the 21st century has been celebrated as a return to more buoyant growth and renewed convergence with the advanced economies.Despite the recent progress in improving living standards and reducing poverty, achieving high and sustainable growth continues to be the main challenge for policymakers.Rwanda and Ethiopia have led Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in terms of per-capita growth since 2000, growing faster than South Asia. However, the gap between the resource-rich countries of Africa with East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), SAR, and the advanced economies has widened since 2010, underlining the difficulty of accelerating growth.Africa has often been portrayed as a continent of boundless natural riches that have helped pull the whole subcontinent forward. Indeed, resource-rich Africa accounts for a dominant part of SSA’s economy. Resource-rich SSA accounts for 70 percent of both the subcontinent’s GDP and physical capital, 60 percent of its natural capital, and nearly 40 percent of its population. For the continent in aggregate and in per capita terms, however, natural resources are just a bit higher than in the South Asia Region (SAR) and lag all other developing regions.One way of thinking of strengthening economic growth depends on more exploration and development of natural resources that should help increase the continent’s natural wealth, as has happened in many other developing regions.More importantly, durable prosperity in resource-rich Africa depends on building up the assets, or components of overall wealth, that are in relatively short supply. In recent years, the literature has started to focus on assets and assets diversification as a path to development, and the World Bank has led in this area. In this report, we emphasize the two complementary types of assets that Africa’s resource-rich countries need to build up to accelerate growth: one is within national borders and the other across borders.
Kyrgyz Republic Country Economic Memorandum
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03-26) Izvorski, Ivailo; Mbowe, Appolenia; Dubashov, Bakyt; Gassner, Katharina; Ferrantino, Michael J.; Islam, Roumeen; Sahovic, Tarik; Izvorski, Ivailo
The Kyrgyz Republic has experienced modest and volatile economic expansion since the economy bottomed out from the transition recession in 1995, when GDP amounted to about half of its pre-independence levels. As a result of structural reforms at the start of transition, the emergence of remittances and commodity exports, largely gold, as powerful new drivers of growth, and improvements in the macroeconomic management in the recent decade, per-capita real GDP grew by 3.1 percent a year on average since 1995. The Kyrgyz Republic is now a lower middle-income economy, as it was in 1990. Economic expansion has benefitted from fixed investment that has risen to 31 percent of GDP, one of the highest in Europe and Central Asia and well-above the threshold of 25 percent reached by the group of successful countries studied by the Growth Commission in 2007. Lower fiscal deficits and low inflation indicate the success of recent macroeconomic policies. These achievements notwithstanding, Kyrgyz Republic’s growth and productivity performance has lagged most relevant comparators, frustrating the needs of the poor and the young. As a result, while per-capita GDP in constant prices has doubled since 1995, it has still not caught up with pre-independence levels. Per-capita incomes in the Kyrgyz Republic have increased by 20 percent less than the average of lower middle-income countries since 2000 and 40 percent less than the average for the Caucasus and Central Asia. Productivity increases – proxied by changes in total factor productivity, have averaged half a percent since 2000, leaving largely factor accumulation as the driver of economic growth. And while ‘Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything’, highlighting one of the main challenges of the country’s current growth model.3 Poverty has declined, but modest growth has made a modest dent, leaving the poverty rate as high as 31 percent, with a substantial part of the population living in regions with more limited and lower quality government services than in Bishkek.
Uzbekistan Public Expenditure Review
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12-31) Izvorski, Ivailo V.; Trushin, Eskender; Appiah-Koranteng, Alex; Varoudakis, Aristomene; Islam, Roumeen; Safarov, Maksudjon; Lord, David; Motohashi, Mitsunori; Ihsan, Ahya; Zorya, Sergiy; Hawkesworth, Ian; Philipsen, Ferry; James, Sebastian; Anadolu, Elvira; Teixeira, Janssen; Karakulah, Kenan; Izvorski, Ivailo
This Public Expenditure Review (PER) takes stock of fiscal developments and institutions and analyzes the key issues that bear on the level, composition, challenges, and effectiveness of government spending and the stance of fiscal policy. Understanding these issues is essential, as new fiscal pressures are emerging in the process of economic transformation and as citizens demand higher quality of education and other public services. The fiscal reform agenda remains extensive but working on it will provide an opportunity to strengthen the effectiveness of government and boost inclusive economic growth. In the process of ongoing economic transformation, the government is facing several challenges in fiscal policy, for which this PER has developed policy options.
A Policy Framework for Mitigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04-20) Moorty, Lalita; Mahajan, Sandeep; Andronova Vincelette, Gallina; Izvorski, Ivailo; Izvorski, Ivailo
COVID-19 is a seismic shock the likes of which have not been seen in living memory. What makes it different? For one, it is a rolling combination of a global health pandemic and an economic crisis that is unfolding at an unprecedented pace. The impact is already devastating at both the human and economic levels, in mutually reinforcing ways. Second, the crisis has turned truly global in record time, to an extent that the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) became only after half a year or later. The epicenter of the health crisis has shifted from China to Europe and now to the US. But the health and economic consequences are affecting every part of the inhabited world, with rising ferocity. Third, this is both a demand- and supply-side economic shock. The world has seen severe demand shocks (the Great Depression and the GFC) and severe supply shocks (the two World Wars, the Oil Crisis of the 1970s), but rarely the two at same time. The damage from the current crisis in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and elsewhere is deep and multifaceted, wherein the adverse outcomes can be put in three main categories: human suffering, economic recession, and financial and corporate sector distress. The COVID-19, a major health crisis, has also quickly turned into an economic crisis, and threatens to become a serious financial crisis, with each acting in mutually reinforcing ways. The immediate policy response must focus on containing the virus outbreak and managing it in its three dimensions (health, economic, and financial and corporate).
Diversified Development : Making the Most of Natural Resources in Eurasia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-02-26) Izvorski, Ivailo; Gill, Indermit S.; van Eeghen, Willem; De Rosa, Donato; Izvorski, Ivailo; Iootty De Paiva Dias, Mariana; Kojo, Naoko; Matin, Kazi M.; Pathikonda, Vilas; Sugawara, Naotaka
This report is about the twelve countries of the former Soviet Union (Eurasia). About 85 percent of the region’s economic output is in six resource-rich economies. Today, 85 percent of Eurasia’s 280 million people are no longer poor. But academics who study resource-based economies debate whether these countries are cursed or blessed. And Eurasia’s policymakers long for the day when their economies are less extractive and more innovative. These observations prompt questions: Are resources a blessing or a curse? If it is one of these things, what would make it into the other? How much should Eurasia try to diversify their exports and economies away from natural resources? Are there ways to make Eurasian economies both extractive and innovative? The answers: a large majority of Eurasia’s people should consider themselves blessed. To make sure that this blessing does not become a curse, Eurasian economies have to become efficient—more productive, job-creating, and stable. But efficiency is not the same as diversification: there is little evidence that more concentrated economies have slower productivity growth, fewer jobs, or much more economic volatility. Governments need to worry less about the composition of exports and production and more about asset portfolios—natural resources, built capital, and economic institutions. They have much to do. Eurasia’s portfolios are heavy in tangibles like oil and gas and roads and railways and light in intangibles such as the institutions for managing resource earnings, providing social services, and regulating enterprise. But tangibles are not what distinguish success from failure—investments in intangibles, early in their development, have made some resource-rich countries both extractive and innovative.