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This note assesses empirically the role Chinese activity plays in global commodities markets, showing that the strength of China's economic activity has a significant bearing on commodity prices, but that the impact differs across commodity markets, with industrial production shocks having a substantial impact on metals and crude oil prices and less so on food prices. The size of the impact on the prices of specific commodities varies with China's footprint in the market for those commodities; the empirical estimates indicate that, over a one-year horizon, a 1 percent increase in industrial production leads to a 5–7 percent rise in metals and fuel prices. The surprise component in Chinese industrial production announcements has a bearing on commodity prices that is comparable in magnitude to that of industrial production surprises in the United States, and this impact is much larger when global risk aversion is high.

This paper finds that tightening global financial conditions can worsen emerging economies'public debt dynamics through an increasing interest rate-growth differential, particularly if coupled with high global risk aversion. Latin America and emerging Europe are the regions most likely to be adversely affected. In addition, historical evidence—analyzed by means of a Poisson count model—suggests that the frequency of sovereign debt crises increases in emerging economies at the early stage of U.S. monetary tightening cycles, at times in which the term spread also rises. The timing may be related to abrupt switches of expectations about the future course of policy in the early stages of tightening cycles.

This paper examines the impact of fiscal policy on employment through the lenses of Okun's Law. Looking at the panel of OECD countries over the past three decades, we find that fiscal policy can affect employment beyond the impact it is traditionally assumed to exert through the output multiplier. In particular, this impact is found to be effective for most items of current discretionary expenditure and for corporate income taxes and social security contributions. Okun's Law is found to be stable under almost all model specifications, but higher spending on subsidies and lower social security contributions can amplify the impact of the output gap on employment gaps.

The West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), like other monetary unions, faces a number of challenges in dealing with macroeconomic shocks. The region experiences a large number of exogenous shocks: climate-related (e.g., droughts, floods), with a heavy toll on populations and agriculture, but also economic (e.g., terms of trade), with a large impact on key sectors and the cost of living. More generally business cycle synchronization within the WAEMU seems low. Addressing these shocks, while preserving the stability of the union, is therefore a critical issue in the WAEMU.This paper discusses these issues and suggests possible reforms.