Publication: Potential Growth Prospects: Risks, Rewards, and Policies
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2023-03-10
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2023-03-10
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Potential output growth around the world slowed over the past two decades. This slowdown is expected to continue in the remainder of the 2020s: global potential growth is projected to average 2.2 percent per year in 2022–30, 0.4 percentage point below its 2011-21 average. Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) will face an even steeper slowdown, of about 1.0 percentage point to 4.0 percent per year on average during 2022–30. The slowdown will be widespread, affecting most EMDEs and countries accounting for 70 percent of global GDP. Global potential growth over the remainder of this decade could be even slower than projected in the baseline scenario—by another 0.2–0.9 percentage point a year—if investment growth, improvements in health and education outcomes, or developments in labor markets disappoint, or if adverse events materialize. A menu of policy options is available to help reverse the trend of weakening economic growth, including policies to enhance physical and human capital accumulation; to encourage labor force participation by women and older adults; to improve the efficiency of public spending; and to mitigate and adapt to climate change, including infrastructure investment to facilitate the green transition.
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“Kilic Celik,Sinem; Kose, M. Ayhan; Ohnsorge,Franziska. 2023. Potential Growth Prospects: Risks, Rewards, and Policies. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/39553”
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Publication Subdued Potential Growth(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03)Global potential output growth has been flagging. At 2.5 percent in 2013-17, post-crisis potential growth is 0.5 percentage point below its longer-term average and 0.9 percentage point below its average a decade ago. Compared with a decade ago, potential growth has declined 0.8 percentage point in advanced economies and 1.1 percentage point in emerging market and developing economies. The slowdown mainly reflected weaker capital accumulation but is also evidence of decelerating productivity growth and demographic trends that dampen labor supply growth. Unless countered, these forces are expected to continue and to depress global potential growth further by 0.2 percentage point over the next decade. A menu of policy options is available to help reverse this trend, including comprehensive policy initiatives to lift physical and human capital and to encourage labor force participation by women and older workers.Publication Potential Growth(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03)Potential growth—the rate of expansion an economy can sustain at full capacity and employment—is a critical driver of development progress. It is also a major input in the formulation of fiscal and monetary policies over the business cycle. This paper introduces the most comprehensive database to date, covering the nine most commonly used measures of potential growth for up to 173 countries over 1981–2021. Based on this database, the paper presents three findings. First, all measures of global potential growth show a steady and widespread decline over the past decade, with all the fundamental drivers of growth losing momentum over time. In 2011–21, potential growth was below its 2000–10 average in nearly all advanced economies and roughly 60 percent of emerging market and developing economies. Second, adverse events, such as the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, contributed to the decline. At the country-level also, national recessions lowered potential growth even five years after their onset. Third, the persistent impact of recessions on potential growth operated through weaker growth of investment, employment, and productivity.Publication Slowdown in Emerging Markets(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)A synchronous growth slowdown has been underway in emerging markets (EM) since 2010. Growth in these countries is now markedly slower than, not just the pre‐crisis average, but also the long‐term average. As a group, EM growth eased from 7.6 percent in 2010 to 4.5 percent in 2014, and is projected to slow further to below 4 percent in 2015. This moderation has affected all regions (except South Asia) and is the most severe in Latin America and the Caribbean. The deceleration is highly synchronous across countries, especially among large EM. By 2015, China, Russia, and South Africa had all experienced three consecutive years of slower growth. The EM‐AE growth differential has narrowed to two percentage points in 2015, well below the 2003‐08 average of 4.8 percentage points and near the long‐term average differential of 1990‐2008. The recent slowdown in EM has been a source of a lively debate, as evident from the quotations at the beginning of this note. Some economists paint a bleak picture for the future of EM and argue that the impressive growth performance of EM prior to the crisis was driven by temporary commodity booms and rapid debt accumulation, and will not be sustained. Others emphasize that a wide range of cyclical and structural factors are driving the slowdown: weakening macroeconomic fundamentals after the crisis; prospective tightening in financial conditions; resurfacing of deep‐rooted governance problems in EM; and difficulty adjusting to disruptive technological changes. Still others highlight differences across EM and claim that some of them are in a better position to weather the slowdown and will likely register strong growth in the future. This policy research note seeks to help move the debate forward by examining the main features, drivers, and implications of the recent EM slowdown and provides a comprehensive analysis of available policy options to counteract it.Publication Challenges of Fiscal Policy in Emerging and Developing Economies(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06)This paper presents a systematic analysis of the availability and use of fiscal space in emerging and developing economies. These economies built fiscal space in the run-up to the Great Recession of 2008-09, which was then used for stimulus. This reflects a more general trend over the past three decades, where availability of fiscal space has been associated with increasingly countercyclical (or less procyclical) fiscal policy. However, fiscal space has shrunk since the Great Recession and has not returned to pre-crisis levels. Emerging and developing economies face downside risks to growth and prospects of rising financing costs. In the event that these cause a sharp cyclical slowdown, policy makers may need to employ fiscal policy as a possible tool for stimulus. An important prerequisite for fiscal policy to be effective is that these economies have the necessary fiscal space to employ countercyclical policies. Over the medium-term, credible and well-designed institutional arrangements, such as fiscal rules, stabilization funds, and medium-term expenditure frameworks, can help build fiscal space and strengthen policy outcomes.Publication Post-HIPC growth dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa(2011-12-01)Access to debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative enhanced the growth performance across Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the subset of debt-ridden low-income countries. Over the past few years, these Completion Point countries have enjoyed significantly higher investments and growth rates, primarily fueled by the expanding fiscal space of the post-Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative era. They are also weathering the adverse effects of the global crisis much better than their non-Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative counterparts. Despite these growth rebounds, the region is not likely to meet the Millennium Development Goals, however. Long-term growth projections from a simple macroeconomic model, which is applied to Ethiopia, suggest that prospects for reversing the widening income gaps with other regions of the developing world are limited. Under the baseline scenario, assuming current growth trends, the estimates show that it could take more than five decades for per capita real income to double in Ethiopia. However, even these gloomy prospects are likely to be undermined by the looming risk of another sovereign debt crisis. In effect, the experiments show that lowering interest rates on external debt would not bridge the widening income gap with other regions of the world, unless it is accompanied by a rapid expansion of capital accumulation financed by sustained inflows of foreign aid.
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