Finance And Development December 2018

This paper focuses on overcoming fears of technology and globalization means rethinking the rights and obligations of citizenship. While the causes of our discontent vary, they all point to the need to revitalize politics, economics, and social contract to provide citizens with a greater sense of security and confidence in the face of impending changes. The backlash highlights the need for a new social contract, one that adapts to changed economic realities and better manages the social implications of globalization. The social contract includes the payment of taxes in exchange for public goods, and the way that society looks after the old, the young, the infirm, and those who have fallen on hard times. Countries with greater social mobility grow faster because they more effectively match people to the right jobs. Another way to address inequality would be to put a floor under incomes, which would help ensure that even low-wage earners can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.

This issue focuses on recent experiences that holds lessons for when to tackle debt and when not to. Growth is picking up, and the IMF has been ratcheting up its forecasts. Government coffers are filling and, with more people at work, demand for public social support is receding. Research shows that the stimulatory effect of fiscal expansion is weak when the economy is close to capacity. Low-income economies may be at greatest risk. Traditionally, they borrowed from official creditors at below-market rates. Higher global rates could divert precious budget resources to debt servicing from crucial infrastructure projects and social services. Raising budget balances toward their medium-term targets can be achieved at little cost to economic activity. Growth-enhancing infrastructure investments and crucial social services such as health and education should be maintained. Well-designed fiscal policy can address inequality and stimulate growth.

This paper discusses that from shifting demographics to climate change, Southeast Asia confronts a host of challenges. Summoning them will require both resilience and flexibility. Advances in artificial intelligence, including robotics, together with innovations such as 3-D printing and new composite materials, will transform manufacturing processes, making them less labor-intensive while creating opportunities for new products. This will enable new ways of making things and change the drivers of competitiveness. There will be indirect effects as well. For example, aircraft manufacturers, taking advantage of new composite materials such as carbon fibers, have developed a class of superlong-haul aircraft that could bring more tourists to Southeast Asia as relatively cheap point-to-point travel options emerge. The region should still enjoy synergies from globalization and other modes of economic integration, but the form and shape of such integration could change. For Southeast Asia, the next couple of decades could prove exhilarating in terms of the opportunities presented by technology and global growth, but also tumultuous because of the continuing risks, such as those posed by an unreformed and unstable international financial architecture. There clearly is much hard work to be done. Policymakers still have not gotten everything right, but they are heading in the right direction.

This paper focuses on smart policies that can alleviate the short-term pain of technological disruption and pave the way for long-term gain. As computing power improves dramatically and more and more people around the world participate in the digital economy, care should be taken about how to devise policies that will allow us to fully exploit the digital revolution’s benefits while minimizing job dislocation. Digital technology will spread further, and efforts to ignore it or legislate against it will likely fail. Even with short-term dislocations, reorganizing the economy around revolutionary technologies generates huge long-term benefits. The digital revolution should be accepted and improved rather than ignored and repressed. Given the global reach of digital technology, and the risk of a race to the bottom, there is a need for policy cooperation like that of global financial markets and sea and air traffic. The history of earlier general-purpose technologies demonstrates that even with short-term dislocations, reorganizing the economy around revolutionary technologies generates huge long-term benefits.

This issue focuses on recent experiences that holds lessons for when to tackle debt and when not to. Growth is picking up, and the IMF has been ratcheting up its forecasts. Government coffers are filling and, with more people at work, demand for public social support is receding. Research shows that the stimulatory effect of fiscal expansion is weak when the economy is close to capacity. Low-income economies may be at greatest risk. Traditionally, they borrowed from official creditors at below-market rates. Higher global rates could divert precious budget resources to debt servicing from crucial infrastructure projects and social services. Raising budget balances toward their medium-term targets can be achieved at little cost to economic activity. Growth-enhancing infrastructure investments and crucial social services such as health and education should be maintained. Well-designed fiscal policy can address inequality and stimulate growth.

This paper focuses on overcoming fears of technology and globalization means rethinking the rights and obligations of citizenship. While the causes of our discontent vary, they all point to the need to revitalize politics, economics, and social contract to provide citizens with a greater sense of security and confidence in the face of impending changes. The backlash highlights the need for a new social contract, one that adapts to changed economic realities and better manages the social implications of globalization. The social contract includes the payment of taxes in exchange for public goods, and the way that society looks after the old, the young, the infirm, and those who have fallen on hard times. Countries with greater social mobility grow faster because they more effectively match people to the right jobs. Another way to address inequality would be to put a floor under incomes, which would help ensure that even low-wage earners can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.