The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -agreed in 2015 by all 193 member states of the United Nations and complemented by commitments made in the Paris Agreement -map out a broad spectrum of economic, social and environmental objectives to be achieved by 2030. Reaching these goals will require deep transformations in every country, as well as major efforts in monitoring and measuring progress. Here we introduce the SDG Index and Dashboards as analytical tools for assessing countries' baselines for the SDGs that can be applied by researchers in the cross-disciplinary analyses required for implementation. The Index and Dashboards synthesize available country-level data for all 17 goals, and for each country estimate the size of the gap towards achieving the SDGs. They will be updated annually. All 149 countries for which sufficient data is available face significant challenges in achieving the goals, and many countries' development strategies are imbalanced across the economic, social and environmental priorities. We illustrate the analytical value of the index by examining its relationship with other widely used development indices and by showing how it accounts for cross-national differences in subjective well-being. Given significant data gaps, scope and coverage of the Index and Dashboards are limited, but we suggest that these analyses represent a starting point for a comprehensive assessment of national SDG baselines and can help policymakers determine priorities for early action and monitor progress. The tools also identify data gaps that must be closed for SDG monitoring.

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using a structural vector autoregressive model. The results indicate that the interest rate and bank lending channels are relatively effective in influencing non-hydrocarbon output and consumer prices, while the exchange rate channel does not appear to play an important role as a monetary transmission mechanism because of the pegged exchange rate regimes. The empirical analysis suggests that policy measures and structural reforms-strengthening financial intermediation and facilitating the development of liquid domestic capital markets-would advance the effectiveness of monetary transmission mechanisms in the GCC countries.

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal policy behavior and its time-varying volatility, using panel data for a broad set of advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1990-2012. The empirical results show that discretionary fiscal policy is influenced by policy inertia, the level of public debt, and the output gap in both advanced and emerging-market economies. In addition, the paper finds that macro-financial factors (such as real exchange rate, financial development, interest rates, asset prices, and natural resource rents) and demographic and institutional factors (such as the old-age dependency ratio, the quality of institutions, and policy anchors such as fiscal rules and IMF-supported stabilization programs) tend to have a significant effect on fiscal policy behavior. The results also indicate that higher government debt leads to more volatile fiscal behavior, while fiscal rules and higher institutional quality reduce the volatility of fiscal policy over time.JEL classification: E60, E62, G01, H30, H62

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using a structural vector autoregressive model. The results indicate that the interest rate and bank lending channels are relatively effective in influencing non-hydrocarbon output and consumer prices, while the exchange rate channel does not appear to play an important role as a monetary transmission mechanism because of the pegged exchange rate regimes. The empirical analysis suggests that policy measures and structural reforms-strengthening financial intermediation and facilitating the development of liquid domestic capital markets-would advance the effectiveness of monetary transmission mechanisms in the GCC countries.

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