Evolving megatrends like demographic shifts, climate change, and technological advances are prompting new thinking around how to unlock labor productivity. Their impacts on labor markets will depend on the policy choices governments make. Megatrends like demographic shifts, technological advances, and climate change are transforming labor markets across Asia and the Pacific, and beyond. This is […]
Asia and the Pacific is a global leader in electric mobility and energy-efficient transport, with significant progress in railway electrification and emissions reduction. However, these advancements remain untracked in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals. These charts illustrate why that matters. Despite decades of recognizing the crucial role of transport in sustainable development, the 2015 […]
Asia and the Pacific urgently needs to close the climate-related insurance gap. Solutions like green bonds, parametric insurance, and adaptation financing emphasize partnerships, nature-based investments, and tech-driven risk assessments to boost resilience. Insurance coverage in Asia and the Pacific is facing a growing gap between the losses caused by climate-related disasters and the amount of […]
Quantifying technology adoption, spillovers, and diffusion across firms is crucial for understanding industry dynamics, and in turn countries’ growth. This column combines firm-level input-output VAT data from Turkey with other data to identify the channels of technology spillovers and diffusion. The authors find a positive effect of robot adoption by one firm on vertically connected […]
Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and other technologies are reshaping labour markets and challenging long-held beliefs about the skills and character traits that drive success. This column investigates the personalities best suited to different occupations, and the resulting implications for organisational strategy. The findings suggest that intellectual tenacity – the ability to persist through challenges […]
The EU’s Blue Growth Strategy emphasises leadership in blue energy and progress in sectors such as aquaculture and blue biotechnology. However, challenges remain in accounting for marine ecosystem contributions and assessing the degree of inclusive blue growth. This column distinguishes between weak sustainability, which allows for trade-offs between dimensions of blue growth, and strong sustainability, […]
Despite claims in the past that demographic trends would lead to either the Republican or the Democratic party dominating politics, US presidential elections continue to be close contests. Using data covering 1952 to 2020, this column argues that forecasts based on accurate projections of demographic trends would have predicted elections less accurately than a coin […]
Natural disasters not only cause damage to public infrastructure and personal property but also impact businesses by destroying warehouses, facilities, manufacturing equipment, and factories. However, evidence regarding how climate risks affect firms’ fixed asset management is lacking. This column uses unique firm-level data on extreme weather losses in 40 countries to show that firms are […]
Roughly 300,000 foreign-born students annually obtained visas to enrol in US graduate programmes over the last decade. This column finds that the small percentage of foreign students who remained in the US after earning master’s degrees made outsized contributions to the creation of new startups. As startups and new firms are engines of economic growth […]
Journal editors influence scientific knowledge and research dissemination. But despite work to resolve inequalities and encourage diversity, gender gaps remain on journal editorial boards, especially in finance and economics. This column examines diversity and inclusion on academic editorial boards, focusing on finance journals. Women make up 20% of editors on average, with substantial variance across […]
