"The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions. The specification of these models is dictated by the issues at stake, the knowledge about the nature of the process involved, and the availability and reliability of relevant data. Furthermore, shocks and policies have macroeconomic, structural, and distributional implications. This creates interdependence between such policy issues. Finally, the distributional impact of shocks and policies hinges on the heterogeneity of socioeconomic agents with respect to endowments and behavior. In the end, each modeling approach should be judged on how well it handles the interdependence between policy issues and the heterogeneity of the stakeholders, given other constraints. " -- Cover verso.

Developing countries face a host of macroeconomic challenges in the design and implementation of development strategies and policies. The importance of the underlying poverty and distributional issues creates a need for relevant and reliable ways of tracking the social impact of shocks and policies. This paper describes and demonstrates the use of a stylized framework for simulating the poverty implications of the Dutch disease, a change in the terms of trade and budgetary policy. The basic approach is to embed a Lorenz model of the size distribution of economic welfare in a general equilibrium model of an open economy. It is observed that, while aggregate welfare and poverty effects may be negligible, the structural and distributional impacts tend to be significant. The latter drive the political economy of policymaking and point to the need for an analytical framework that accounts for both the structural richness of the economy and the heterogeneity of the stakeholders.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

United States monetary policy has traditionally been modeled under the assumption that the domestic economy is immune to international factors and exogenous shocks. Such an assumption is increasingly unrealistic in the age of integrated capital markets, tightened links between national economies, and reduced trading costs. International Dimensions of Monetary Policy brings together fresh research to address the repercussions of the continuing evolution toward globalization for the conduct of monetary policy. In this comprehensive book, the authors examine the real and potential effects of increased openness and exposure to international economic dynamics from a variety of perspectives. Their findings reveal that central banks continue to influence decisively domestic economic outcomes—even inflation—suggesting that international factors may have a limited role in national performance. International Dimensions of Monetary Policy will lead the way in analyzing monetary policy measures in complex economies.

A companion to the bestseller, The Impact of Economic Policies on Poverty and Income Distribution, this title deals with theoretical challenges and cutting-edge macro-micro linkage models. The authors compare the predictive and analytical power of various macro-micro linkage techniques using the traditional RHG approach as a benchmark to evaluate standard policies, such as a typical stabilization package and a typical structural reform policy.

Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) is an approach used increasingly by governments, civil society organizations, the World Bank, and other development partners to examine the distributional impacts of policy reforms on the well-being of different stakeholders groups, particularly the poor and vulnerable. PSIA has an important role in the elaboration and implementation of poverty reduction strategies in developing countries because it promotes evidence-based policy choices and fosters debate on policy reform options. 'Poverty and Social Impact Analysis of Reforms' presents a collection of case studies that illustrate the spectrum of sectors and policy reforms to which PSIA can be applied; it also elaborates on the broad range of analytical tools and techniques that can be used for PSIA. The case studies provide examples of the impact that PSIA can have on the design of policy reforms and draw operational lessons for PSIA implementation. The case studies deal largely with policy reforms in a single sector, such as agriculture (crop marketing boards in Malawi and Tanzania and cotton privatization in Tajikistan); energy (mining sector in Romania and oil subsidies in Ghana); utilities (power sector reform in Ghana, Rwanda, and transition economies, and water sector reform in Albania); social sectors (education reform in Mozambique and social welfare reform in Sri Lanka); taxation reform (Nicaragua); as well as macroeconomic modeling (Burkina Faso).

The crisis threatens the welfare of about 160 million people in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region who are poor or are just above the poverty line. Using pre-crisis household data along with aggregate macroeconomic outturns to simulate the impact of the crisis on households transmitted via credit market shocks, price shocks, and income shocks this report finds that adverse effects are widespread and that poor and non-poor households alike are vulnerable. By 2010, for the region as a whole, some 11 million more people will likely be in poverty and over 23 million more people will find themselves just above the poverty line because of the crisis. The aggregate results mask the heterogeneity of impact within countries, including the concentration of the poverty impact in selected economic sectors. Meanwhile, stress tests on household indebtedness in selected countries suggest that ongoing macroeconomic shocks will expand the pool of households unable to service their debt, many of them from among the ranks of relatively richer households. In fact, already there are rising household loan delinquency rates. Finally, there is evidence that the food and fuel crisis is not over and a new round of price increases, via currency adjustments, will have substantial effects on net consumers. Lessons from last year s food crisis suggest that the poor are the worst hit, as many of the poor in Albania, Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan, for example, are net food consumers, with limited access to agricultural assets and inputs. The resilience of households to macroeconomic shocks ultimately depends upon the economy's institutional readiness, the flexibility of the economic policy regime, and the ability of the population to adjust. However, compared with previous crises, the scope for households to engage in their traditional coping strategies may be more limited. Fiscal policy responses in the short-term are also constrained by rapidly falling revenues. Governments in ECA have to make difficult choices over what spending items to protect and what items to cut, social protection programs to reform and scale-up, and new interventions to mitigate the impact of the crisis.