In 2024 food security is likely to remain one of the critical challenges for the world to face. The World Bank has therefore included food and nutrition security among the eight global challenges to address at scale, and has mobilized $45 billion in resources to tackle issues and protect livelihoods worldwide — surpassing its initial projected commitment […]
Regulation, Forex, Crypto, Web 3.0, NFTs, Metaverse, ESG, AI Will Be in Focus. Taking place on May 17, 2024, Wiki Finance Expo Hong Kong 2024 is one of the largest and most influential fintech and digital finance events in Asia in 2024. Participation is completely free. The event ticket includes admission to sky100 observation deck […]
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people are neither consistently selfish nor consistently altruistic. Instead, their public-spiritedness depends on their contexts. This column provides an integrative framework for thinking about the context-dependence of moral values. It gives useful insights for understanding how people behave in addressing their existing collective action problems and provides guidelines for […]
Politicians often interfere with central banks, but it is not clear how to measure such political pressure systematically and therefore difficult to quantify its economic consequences. This column uses archival records to build a dataset of personal interactions between US presidents and Federal Reserve officials between 1933 and 2016, and isolates personal interactions that reflect […]
As artificial intelligence makes inroads into the financial system, it exacerbates existing channels of instability and creates new ones. This column identifies several such channels, malicious and misinformed use, misalignment and the evasion of control, and finally risk monoculture and oligopolies. All arise when AI vulnerabilities interact with economic fragilities like strategic complementarities, problems of […]
Classical economic models routinely included land as a production factor, a practice economists later abandoned. This column argues that adding natural capital in economic models is necessary for achieving environmental sustainability. The EU has comparatively advanced data on resource use and ecosystem services, but this covers only part of what is needed to fully understand […]
Are the goals of combating climate change and ending global poverty at odds with each other? This column estimates the economic growth needed to reduce poverty, and the greenhose gas emissions that this growth is likely to generate, to show how the answer to this question depends in part on the evolution of global and […]
Adolescent girls in Sub-Sharan Africa (SSA) are at a higher risk of dropping out of upper secondary school. According to UNESCO, over 19.3 million adolescent girls of upper secondary school age are out of school in SSA and for those who make it to upper secondary school, studying Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) particularly […]
China has admitted its electric-car drive has gone too far. The country’s vice minister of industry and information technology on Friday pledged to reduce EV makers’ overcapacity, saying that the government will take “forceful measures to prevent superfluous projects.” Amid a brutal price war at home and heightening trade tensions abroad, it’s a welcome step. […]
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the Kyrgyzstan-Xinjiang border region on Tuesday with reports of several injuries and collapsed houses, Chinese state media reported. The epicentre of the quake struck at 2:09 a.m. (1809 GMT) and at a depth of 22 km (13 miles) in the mountainous border area of Wushi County in northwest China’s Xinjiang […]
