The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that trade tensions and sluggish productivity growth can slow the decline in relative prices of machinery and equipment, which may hold back investment growth worldwide.More broadly, the empirical analysis shows that for average emerging markets and developing economies, about one-third increase in real investment rate in machinery and equipment over the past three decades can be attributed to the cheapening of capital goods relative to consumption.Stronger macroeconomic policies and other factors contributed the rest. However, prices of machinery and equipment have been falling relative to overall prices for decades, largely due to rising trade and sweeping technological improvements that led to the more efficient production of capital goods.This has helped countries around the world raise real investment and improve living standard, said economists at IMF's Research Department Weicheng Lian, Natalija Novta and Petia Topalova."But this ..
