On the eve of the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact convened later this month by the government of France, many of the world’s poorest countries face a host of competing policy priorities while struggling to raise the funds to address them. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, developing countries need to regain […]
U.S. memory chipmaker Micron said on Friday it was committed to China and would invest 4.3 billion yuan ($603 million) over the next few years in its chip packaging facility in the Chinese city of Xian. The company has been targeted by China’s cyberspace regulator, which last month said the firm, the United States’ biggest memory chipmaker, had […]
Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the global rise of artificial intelligence with Bill Gates on Friday and said he welcomed U.S. firms including Microsoft bringing their AI tech to China, two sources familiar with the talks said. Xi also discussed Microsoft’s business development in China during their meeting in Beijing, one of the sources said. Gates, […]
Intel plans to invest up to $4.6 billion in a new semiconductor assembly and test facility near Wrocław, Poland, as part of a multi-billion-dollar investment drive across Europe to build chip capacity, it said on Friday. The U.S. chipmaker last year announced plans to build a big chip complex in Germany along with facilities in Ireland and France […]
The global battle to reshape the lithium industry is sucking in oil producers, tech startups and entrenched mining giants, each jockeying to be the first to reinvent how a metal key to the green energy transition is produced. A fleet of direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies are on the verge of tapping salty brine deposits […]
The relationship between rising inflation and economic growth is a topic of ongoing debate in macroeconomics. According to the classical “neutrality of money” view, increases in inflation have little effect on real gross domestic product (GDP), as inflation increases both prices and wages similarly and merely alters the units of measurement. A related viewpoint is […]
The question of why talented individuals move across borders has attracted much interest due to the significant impacts on the receiving and the source countries. This column studies what induces academics to move to an institution in a different country, using public publications records for nearly one million academics. The results show that more eminent […]
Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidised provision of healthcare through publicly operated facilities. This column discusses the rationales for this transition and reviews the performance of health insurance schemes over the last two decades. Despite evidence that health insurance has provided financial protection, […]
Weekly extra-EU27 imports of natural gas for 2021 and 2022, compared with weekly minimum and maximum import values for the period 2015-2020. By selecting from the dropdown, the figure shows total imports but also imports exclusively from Russia, Norway, Algeria pipelines, liquefied natural gas (LNG, gas transported by ship from around the world), and the […]
1 Introduction Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), a digital equivalent of cash, are increasingly gaining traction. At least 114 jurisdictions, representing 95 percent of global GDP, are at some stage of developing a CBDC 1 . In 11 countries, CBDCs are now a reality and operate in parallel to their physical equivalent. But it is not necessarily […]
