Recent research suggests that wages below legally established minimum wages are surprisingly prevalent. This column reviews ‘wage theft’ in the US and its impact on the wage gains workers might otherwise enjoy. Most firms comply with increases in the minimum wage, especially when they have time to plan for the increase, but evasion and avoidance […]
In seven East Asia and Pacific (EAP) countries, policymakers prioritize secondary school completion over basic learning quality, while underestimating the levels of learning poverty – which measures the share of 10-year-olds who can’t read and understand a simple text – among their students. This oversight can hinder efforts to improve student learning outcomes in the […]
On this year’s International Day of Education, we reflected on the almost 15.5 million refugee children and youth worldwide. More than half of these children are not in school, with significant additional challenges for girls, children with disabilities, and other vulnerable groups. The scale and increasingly protracted nature of displacement makes it critical to act […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is considered a general-purpose technology that, like electricity, could transform our lives. AI technology can detect symptoms related to the early stages of cancer, predict the next virus mutation, create works of art, plan your investment portfolio, and even help craft this blog. The growing number of AI applications promises to transform […]
Improving management of road travel speeds will decrease traffic deaths and injuries in the Asia and the Pacific. Policies focused on enforcement, road design, vehicle technology, and urban planning are needed. Managing travel speeds on the roads of Asia and the Pacific will save lives and avoid economically costly, often debilitating, injuries. Recent studies show that […]
Waste amounted to 3.3 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, with landfills the primary source. As climate change continues to pose an ever-looming existential threat to the world and its inhabitants, managing waste more sustainably and efficiently is critical. The waste management process (See Figure 1) involves many stakeholders, including businesses, governments, households, community […]
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 […]
