The nutritional impact of the recession and the SCN The subject of this note is the impact of high food prices and the global financial crisis on the hunger and malnutrition targets of the MDG1, as well as their likely repercussions with regard to other MDGs, especially MDG4 and 5, and actions needed to mitigate these effects. As the policy harmonization body for nutrition of the UN, the SCN is...

“Architecture” may seem a rather pretentious word to describe the ad hoc set of arrangements that make up the current international financial system . Even a reformed financial system will surely lack the clarity of structure and design that are the hallmarks of good architecture . But a financial system should nevertheless conform to certain broad principles, which can be readily understood an...

This paper focuses on evaluation of the impact of the global financial crisis on the process of real convergence within the EU28 economies. The beta-convergence approach is verified by the use of crosssectional linear regression analysis. The sigma-convergence is tested by standard deviation of real GDP per capita. The aim is to verify the hypothesis that the betaand sigma-convergence (βand σ-c...

1 INTRODUCTION I wish to begin with a crucial introductory point. According to all of the models commonly in use at central banks and international financial institutions, this crisis was not supposed to happen. Indeed, it could not happen. Modern macro models such as the New Classical, New Keynesian, and DSGE models rule out extended economic disequilibria by assumption. More traditional struc...

As the global financial crisis has shown, reaping the benefits of financial development and international financial integration without incurring large risks remains a key challenge for many countries around the world. The financial system is inherently procyclical, that is, it tends to amplify the business cycle. Faced with a positive shock, financial institutions and markets can behave in the...

A the many factors contributing to the financial crisis of 2007–08, the role of the growing interconnectedness of the global financial system is perhaps the least understood. The crisis exposed the fact that regulators and market participants had very limited information about the network of obligations between financial institutions. It also revealed that there was little theoretical understan...

One important reason for the global impact of the 2007–2009 financial crisis was massive illiquidity in combination with an extreme exposure of many financial institutions to liquidity needs and market conditions. As a consequence, many financial instruments could not be traded anymore; investors ran on a variety of financial institutions, particularly in wholesale markets; financial institutio...

Economic events of the past year are beginning to create hardships for tens of thousands of Canadians. There are likely to be health effects as well, to the extent that unemployment and poverty rates rise. Conditions, however, will be much worse for those living in poorer countries. High-income countries are committing trillions of dollars in countercyclical spending and banking bail-outs. Poor...

Why is this topic of house price indexes important? The Global Financial Crisis has several causes but a main cause was a housing bubble in the U.S. which led banks to make mortgage loans that were based on the assumption that house prices were not rising unusually quickly. If accurate regional house price indexes for the U.S. would have been widely available to the public, it is unlikely that ...