This paper discusses about countries that must chart their own paths to effectively balance the potential benefits against the risks and challenges, including institutional and capacity constraints, privacy concerns, and new avenues for fraud and evasion. The digital revolution holds vast potential for fiscal policies. By transforming the way fiscal systems collect, process, and act on information, it can expand and reshape the way governments design and implement their tax, spending, and macro-fiscal policies. Countries will need to chart a path based on their individual circumstances—either by taking incremental steps to digitize, or by leapfrogging to newer and more sophisticated methods of policy formulation and implementation. A recurring theme in this book is the need for greater regional coordination in finding solutions to address the Caribbean’s shared and intertwined macroeconomic and structural challenges. The analysis suggests that strengthening regional and global market integration of Caribbean economies would provide an impetus to sustained growth in incomes and jobs.

This paper focuses on several IMF publications published in the winter of year 2018. Realizing Indonesia’s Economic Potential book uncovers some of the forces that are likely to shape Indonesia’s economy. It analyses the constraints to growth, propose options to boost economic growth, and explore key issues policymakers will need to handle in the future. The ASEAN Way: Sustaining Growth and Stability book provides a comprehensive account of how Association of Southeast Asian Nations, its individual members and as a group, rose above its worst regional financial crisis 20 years ago, to become one of the most resilient in the face of the worst global financial crisis just a decade later. The challenges faced and the policy responses taken, chronicled and analyzed in this study, can hopefully provide further lessons as we face a new global policy paradigm. It is a must-read for academics, the financial community, and policymakers alike.

Poverty in India is intimately connected with caste, untouchability, colonialism and indentured servitude, inseparable from the international experience of slavery and race. Focusing on historical and modern practices, this book goes beyond traditional economic approaches to poverty and demonstrates its genesis in exclusion, isolation, domination and extraction resulting in the removal of human and economic rights. Examining cash and asset transfers, as well as the enhancement of women’s rights, primary health and education, it scrutinizes inadequacies in compensatory policies for redressing the balance. This is an original interdisciplinary contribution that offers bold domestic and international policies anchored in human radicalism to eradicate poverty.

Forward thinking and provocative, this Research Agenda demonstrates different approaches to the field from experts focusing on global and local, and historical and contemporary issues. Eminent global scholars examine a diverse selection of interdisciplinary themes, raising questions surrounding future research, offering examples and linking the theory to its implications for practice and policy.

The Latin American Economic Outlook 2018: Rethinking Institutions for Development focuses on how institutions can underpin the foundations of a long period of sustained and inclusive growth and increased well-being. The report begins with an overview of the main macroeconomic challenges ...

The Near East and North Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition provides new evidence for monitoring trends in food security and nutrition within the framework of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. The in-depth analysis of progress made against Sustainable Development Goal 2 Target 2.1 (to end hunger and ensure access to food by all) and Target 2.2 (to end all forms of malnutrition), as well as the state of micronutrient deficiencies, is complemented by a review on rural transformation policies aimed at addressing food insecurity and nutrition issues. Updated estimates shows that the food security situation on the region continues to worsen since 2011 -2013. For, the Near East and North Africa, 11% of the region’s population – 50.2 million people – are undernourished. The findings of the report showed that the failure to reduce hunger in the area is closely associated with the increase in conflict and violence in several parts of the region, as also highlighted in last year’s edition. While the prevalence of undernourishment has risen from 23 to 26 percent in conflict countries since 2011-13, it has remained stable at about 5 percent in non-conflict countries. This year’s report goes further to explore the relationship between food insecurity, economic growth and rural transformation. It demonstrates that economic growth in the Near East and North Africa region has been slow compared to other regions, and suggests that rural transformation can improve growth rates and generate decent employment through strengthening rural-urban linkages, improving agricultural productivity, and expanding the rural non-farm economy.

The book describes the difficulties of the current international corporate income tax system. It starts by describing its origins and how changes, such as the development of multinational enterprises and digitalization have created fundamental problems, not foreseen at its inception. These include tax competition—as governments try to attract tax bases through low tax rates or incentives, and profit shifting, as companies avoid tax by reporting profits in jurisdictions with lower tax rates. The book then discusses solutions, including both evolutionary changes to the current system and fundamental reform options. It covers both reform efforts already under way, for example under the Inclusive Framework at the OECD, and potential radical reform ideas developed by academics.

China’s Global Disruption: Myths and Reality is the first book to bring world-systemic analyses of China into dialog with domestic analyses, and in so doing, to show how each can challenge or refine the assumptions of the other, ultimately showing that much of the global “common sense” about China is misinformed.

"Despite a long history of program engagement, the Fund has not developed guidance on program design in members of currency unions. The Fund has engaged with members of the four currency unions—the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, the European Monetary Union, and the West African Economic and Monetary Union—under Fund-supported programs. In some cases, union-wide institutions supported their members in undertaking adjustment under Fund-supported programs. As such, several programs incorporated—on an ad hoc basis—critical policy actions that union members had delegated. Providing general guidance on program design for members in a currency union context would fill a gap in Fund policy and help ensure consistent, transparent, and evenhanded treatment across Fund-supported programs. This paper considers two options on when and how the Fund should seek policy assurances from union-level institutions in programs of currency union members. Option 1 would involve amending the Conditionality Guidelines, which would allow the use of standard conditionality tools with respect to actions by union-level institutions. Option 2—which staff prefers—proposes formalizing current practices and providing general guidance regarding principles and modalities on policy assurances from union-level institutions in support of members’ adjustment programs. Neither option would infringe upon the independence (or legally-provided autonomy) of union-level institutions, since the institutions would decide what measures or policy actions to take—just as any independent central bank or monetary authority does, for example, in non-CU members."