Artificial intelligence (AI) will decrease the need for workers in the next decade. Governments are aware of this and are realizing the need to somehow tax AI as if it were a “worker.” But how? We speculate about that here.

Since more than half of the world’s population lives within 120 miles from a coast, this message ponders whether putting data centers underwater near coastal cities could solve some of the problems associated with putting data centers on land.

Climate fintech—the intersection between climate change, financial services, and digital technologies—is playing an important role in attracting more investment into climate finance by leveraging innovative technologies, thereby addressing some financing barriers. While recognizing that technology alone can only be a partial solution, the note outlines how fintech can help address financing challenges for climate investments. It also details the beneficial features of emerging financial technologies in climate finance and explores the limitations of fintech tools. In addition, the note emphasizes private sector efforts in this area, drawing on discussions with market participants, private sector, and regulatory bodies. Finally, it elicits several lessons learned and discusses potential policy implications, focusing on improving quality and accessibility of climate data, developing digital infrastructure, improving the availability of financing and the liquidity of financial instruments for climate investments, and ensuring appropriate environmental and financial regulation. Even though technology offers considerable promise for supporting climate finance, it can only partially alleviate certain barriers while carrying risks that will need to be carefully managed. Fintech should be an integral part of the overall policy solution to help address challenges in scaling up climate finance.

This column examines climate financial technology (fintech), which leverages digital transformation to direct investments to eco-friendly projects. It also discusses growth factors and challenges.

Drawing on survey responses from 34 Asian economies and country case studies, this note takes stock of recent developments related to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and crypto assets in Asia. The survey finds that there is significant heterogeneity in terms of stage of development, but the emergence of private crypto assets has created an impetus to consider CBDCs. While most countries are engaged in research and development, with some at advanced stages of testing and pilots, very few countries are likely to issue CBDCs in the near-to-medium term, reflecting the still considerable uncertainties. Still, country experiences so far provide some key insights for others in their journey in this area.

China’s crypto currency mining business was shut down by the government. It moved to Siberia, and here is a look at how it is thriving.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) raise various data privacy concerns. This article analyses regulatory frameworks for data privacy related to CBDCs in the Asia–Pacific region.

While the world is focused on addressing the near-term ramifications of the COVID-19 shock, we turn attention to another important aspect of the pandemic: its fallout on medium-term potential output through scarring. Taking Australia and New Zealand as examples, we show that the pandemic will likely have a large and persistent impact on potential output, broadly in line with the experience of advanced economies from past recessions. The impact is driven by employment, capital stock, and productivity losses in the wake of an unprecedented sectoral reallocation, hightened uncertainty, and reduced migration. Maintaining fiscal and monetary policy support until the recovery is firmly entrenched and putting in place a strong structural policy agenda to counter the pandemic’s adverse effects on medium-term potential output will be important to support standards of living and strengthen economic resilience in case of renewed shocks.

The Bali Fintech Agenda highlights 12 principles for policymakers to consider when formulating their approaches to new financial technology (fintech). The agenda aims to harness the potential of fintech while managing associated risks. This paper looks at how some elements of the Bali Fintech Agenda could be used in Pacific island countries, which face significant financial-structural challenges.

Reports on how blockchain can impact industries. IN 2009, Toyota announced a recall of four million vehicles due to faulty gas pedals.1 The recall cost an estimated US$2 billion. The company had received pedals from many suppliers. It lacked mechanisms to track the suppliers that were responsible for the faulty pedals. There was, thus, no way to know which cars had the defective pedals. Similar problems are found in the food industry. Blockchain has the potential to provide solutions to problems such as mentioned above by addressing visibility and traceability challenges. Blockchain technology enables companies to record every event or transaction within a supply chain (SC) on a distributed ledger, which is shared among all participants, making it secure, immutable, and irrevocable. It makes it possible to deal with a crisis in a targeted way after such a crisis is discovered and provides distributed trust. Blockchain can facilitate handling and dealing with crisis situations such as product recalls due to faulty parts or security vulnerabilities. Blockchain’s public availability means that it is possible to trace back every product to the origin of the raw materials, and transactions can be linked to identify users of vulnerable parts and devices. Also, blockchain can reduce the costs of a supply chain.

Asia has made significant progress in financial inclusion, but both its across-country and intra-country disparities are among the highest in the world. The gaps between the rich and the poor, rural and urban populations, and men and women remain deep. Income is the main determinant of the level of financial inclusion; but other factors, such as geography, financial sector structure, and policies, also play important roles. While some countries in the Asia-Pacific region are leaders in fintech, on average the region lags behind others in several important areas such as online (internet) purchases, electronic payments, mobile money, and mobile government transfers. This Departmental Paper aims to take stock of the development and current state of financial inclusion and shed light on policies to advance financial inclusion in the region. The research focuses on the impact of financial inclusion on economic growth, poverty reduction, and inequality, linkages between financial inclusion and macroeconomic policies, as well as structural policies that are important for improving financial inclusion. Given the increasing importance of financial technologies (fintech), the paper also provides a snapshot of the fintech landscape in the Asia-Pacific.

Analytical work on Indonesian macroeconomic and financial issues, with an overarching theme on building institutions and policies for prosperity and inclusive growth. The book begins with a 20-year economic overview by former Finance Minister Chatib Basri, with subsequent chapters covering diverse sectors of the economy as well as Indonesia’s place in the global economy.

This paper reports the main findings of a pilot project launched in July 2014 by the IMF’s Statistics Department to test augmenting the IMF’s financial soundness indicators (FSIs) with concentration and distribution measures (CDMs) to capture tail risks, concentrations, variations in distributions, and the volatility of indicators over time that simple averages can miss. Volunteer participants reported a trial set of CDMs to assess analytical usefulness and identify concerns such as confidentiality and reporting burden. The results of the pilot suggests that CDMs can help detect financial sector risks, justifying the additional reporting burden but that further input from participating countries and potential data users should be sought; indeed further refinement of the reporting requirements and the CDMs themselves may be needed.

The paper examines the impact of unconventional monetary policy measures (UMPMs) implemented since 2008 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Euro area and Japan— the Systemic Four—on global monetary and liquidity conditions. Overall, the results show positive significant relationships. However, there are differences in the impact of the UMPMs of individual S4 countries on these conditions in other countries. UMPMs of the Bank of Japan have positive association with global liquidity but negative association with securities issuance. The quantitative easing (QE) of the Bank of England has the opposite association. Results for the quantitative easing measures of the United States Federal Reserve System (U.S. Fed) and the ECB UMPMs are more mixed.

This paper presents an approach to understanding the shadow banking system in the United States using a new Global Flow of Funds (GFF) conceptual framework developed by the IMF’s Statistics Department (STA). The GFF uses external stock and flow matrices to map claims between sector-location pairs. Our findings highlight the large positions and gross flows of the U.S. banking sector (ODCs) and its interconnectedness with the banking sectors in the Euro area and the United Kingdom. European counterparties are large holders of U.S. other financial corporations (OFCs) debt securities. We explore the relationship between credit to domestic entities and the growth of non-core liabilities. We find that external debt liabilities of the financial sector are procyclical and are closely aligned with domestic credit growth.

This paper examines how the financial activities of non-financial corporates (NFCs) in international markets potentially affects domestic monetary aggregates and financial conditions. Monetary aggregates reflect, in part, the activities of NFCs, who channel capital market financing into the domestic banking system, thereby influencing funding conditions and credit availability. Periods of capital inflows are also those when the domestic currency is appreciating, and such periods of rapid exchange rate appreciation coincide with increases in the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves, increasing the stock of narrow money. The paper examines economic significance of cross-country panel data on monetary aggregates and other measures of non-core bank liabilities. Non-core liabilities that reflect the activities of NFCs reflect broad credit conditions and predict global trade and growth.

This paper presents a simple heuristic measure of tail risk, which is applied to individual bank stress tests and to public debt. Stress testing can be seen as a first order test of the level of potential negative outcomes in response to tail shocks. However, the results of stress testing can be misleading in the presence of model error and the uncertainty attending parameters and their estimation. The heuristic can be seen as a second order stress test to detect nonlinearities in the tails that can lead to fragility, i.e., provide additional information on the robustness of stress tests. It also shows how the measure can be used to assess the robustness of public debt forecasts, an important issue in many countries. The heuristic measure outlined here can be used in a variety of situations to ascertain an ordinal ranking of fragility to tail risks.

We use data on 1,294 banks in Central and Eastern Europe to analyze how bank ownership and creditor coordination in the form of the Vienna Initiative affected credit growth during the 2008–09 crisis. As part of the Vienna Initiative western European banks signed country-specific commitment letters in which they pledged to maintain exposures and to support their subsidiaries in Central and Eastern Europe. We show that both domestic and foreign banks sharply curtailed credit during the crisis, but that foreign banks that participated in the Vienna Initiative were relatively stable lenders. We find no evidence of negative spillovers from countries where banks signed commitment letters to countries where they did not.