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This paper proposes a leading indicator, the "Google Mobility Index," for nowcasting monthly industrial production growth rates in selected economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. The index is constructed using the Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Report database via a Kalman filter. The Google database is publicly available starting from February 15, 2020. The paper uses a backcasting methodology to increase the historical number of observations and then augments a lag of one week in the mobility data with other high-frequency data (air quality) over January 1, 2019 to April 30, 2020. Finally, mixed data sampling regression is implemented for nowcasting industrial production growth rates. The Google Mobility Index is a good predictor of industrial production. The results suggest a significant decline in output of between 5 and 7 percent for March and April, respectively, while indicating a trough in output in mid-April.

Air Quality Monitoring --- Coronavirus --- Economic Forecasting --- Economic Growth --- Google Mobility Index --- Industrial Economics --- Industrial Production --- Information Technology --- Production Growth

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This paper describes a modeling methodology that embeds climate damages from natural disasters and risk management strategies into a macroeconomic model for Jamaica. The modeled damages take the form of capital destruction, and the risk management strategies considered are (i) adaptation investment in hurricane resilient infrastructure, (ii) commercial disaster insurance for the government, (iii) the formation of a contingency fund, and (iv) lower debt via higher future primary balances to create fiscal space for disaster recovery. Different risk management strategies are compared to a baseline of no risk management. The model behavior is estimated empirically on country-specific data. Hurricane damage and the model results are analyzed in deterministic and probabilistic settings, using the historical distribution of damages for Jamaica.

Conflict and Development --- Disaster Management --- Disaster Risk Management --- Economic Modeling --- Environment --- Hazard Risk Management --- Hurricane Damage --- Natural Disasters --- Urban Development

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This paper addresses several shortcomings in the productivity and markup estimation literature. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, the analysis shows that the methods in Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2015) and De Loecker and Warzynski (2012) produce biased estimates of the impact of policy variables on markups and productivity. This bias stems from endogeneity due to the following: (1) the functional form of the production function; (2) the omission of demand shifters; (3) the absence of price information; (4) the violation of the Markov process for productivity; and (5) misspecification when marginal costs are excluded in the estimation. The paper addresses these concerns using a quasi-maximum likelihood approach and a generalized estimator for the production function. It produces unbiased estimates of the impact of regulation on markups and productivity. The paper therefore proposes a work-around solution for the identification problem identified in Bond, Hashemi, Kaplan and Zoch (2020), and an unbiased measure of productivity, by directly accounting for the joint impact of regulation on markups and productivity.

Competition Policy --- Enterprise Development and Reform --- Legal Regulation and Business Environment --- Markov Process --- Markups --- Private Sector Development --- Production Function --- Productivity --- Quasi-Maximum Likelihood --- Regulation

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Turkey is vulnerable to natural disasters that can generate substantial damages to public and private sector infrastructure capital. Earthquakes and floods are the most frequent hazards today, and flood risks are expected to increase with climate change. To ensure stability and growth and minimize the welfare impact of these disasters, these shocks need to be managed and accounted for in macro-fiscal and monetary policy. To support this process, the World Bank Macrostructural Model is adapted to assess the macroeconomic effects of natural (geophysical or climate-related) disasters. The macroeconomic model is extended on several fronts: (1) a distinction is made between infrastructure and non-infrastructure capital, with complementary or substitutability between the two categories; (2) the production function is adjusted to account for short-term complementarity across capital assets; (3) the reconstruction process is modeled in a way that accounts for post-disaster constraints, with distinct processes for the reconstruction of public and private assets. The results show that destroyed infrastructure capital makes the remaining non-infrastructure capital less productive, which means that disasters reduce the total stock of capital, but also its productivity. The welfare impact of a disaster-proxied by the discounted consumption loss-is found to increase non-linearly with direct asset losses. Macroeconomic responses reduce the welfare impact of minor disasters but magnify it when direct asset losses exceed the economy's absorption capacity. The welfare impact also depends on the pre-existing economic situation, the ability of the economy to reallocate resources toward reconstruction, and the response of the monetary policy. Appropriate macro-fiscal and monetary policies offer cost-effective opportunities to mitigate the welfare impact of major disasters.

Monetary policy.

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How does the South African government react to changes in its debt position? In investigating the question, this paper estimates fiscal reaction functions using various methods (OLS, VAR, TAR, GMM, State-Space modelling and VECM). The paper finds that since 1946 the South African government has ran a sustainable fiscal policy, by reducing the primary deficit or increasing the surplus in response to rising debt. Looking ahead, the paper considers the use of fiscal reaction functions to forecast the debt/GDP ratio and gauging the likelihood of achieving policy goals with the aid of probabilistic simulations and fan charts.

Finance --- Banks and Banking --- Macroeconomics --- Public Finance --- Production and Operations Management --- Fiscal Policy --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Debt --- Debt Management --- Sovereign Debt --- Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects --- Public finance & taxation --- Fiscal stance --- Output gap --- Public debt --- Fiscal policy --- Real interest rates --- Production --- Economic theory --- Debts, Public --- Interest rates --- South Africa