Defying the trend toward deglobalization and economic fragmentation, African nations are uniting to form a free trade area. The project promises to offer the rest of the world a renewed message of hope on the benefits of removing – not erecting – barriers to free flows of goods, services, investment, and ideas across borders. The […]
The global pandemic of 2020-2022 had truly unprecedented consequences. Along with other crises, such as the war in Ukraine, it plunged the global economy into a steep slowdown that dealt the biggest setback to global poverty in decades. But global responses to the pandemic were equally unprecedented. During the crisis, countries employed toolkits that combined large fiscal, […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on economies worldwide, with many countries experiencing negative GDP growth in 2020 and downgraded growth forecasts for 2021 and 2022. To mitigate the economic setbacks caused by the pandemic, developing countries sought financial assistance from international partners, which contributed to higher external debt levels. For example, between 2019 and […]
Societies and economies are experiencing deep and intertwined structural changes that may unsettle the perceptions European citizens have of their economic and employment security. Such labour-market perceptions are likely in turn to alter people’s political positions. For instance, those worried by labour-market competition may prefer greater social protection to compensate for the accrued risk, or […]
When the European Commission in April 2021 proposed an AI Act to establish harmonised EU-wide harmonised rules for artificial intelligence, the draft law might have seemed appropriate for the state of the art. But it did not anticipate OpenAI’s release of the ChatGPT chatbot, which has demonstrated that AI can generate text at a level […]
Credit information sharing is seen as a critical policy tool to overcome market frictions and inefficiencies. Examinging the change in the reporting threshold of Brazil’s public credit registry in 2012, this column documents an expansion in access to credit for newly included borrowers. While the additional lending comes primarily from new private bank-firm relationships, incumbent […]
Philosophers have speculated that an AI tasked with a task such as creating paperclips might cause an apocalypse by learning to divert ever-increasing resources to the task, and then learning how to resist our attempts to turn it off. But this column argues that, to do this, the paperclip-making AI would need to create another […]
Raising awareness about climate change is important for support and action, but the effects of anticipating its impact are still unclear. This column introduces a new framework to estimate the economic impact of climate change on all US counties, revealing it to be roughly twice as large as previous studies. Anticipation of future changes plays […]
Assessing changes in private leverage is essential for maintaining macro-financial stability. This column examines EU corporate credit and leverage trends and reveals a significant decline in corporate leverage since 2008, with non-financial corporations reducing debt and increasing cash reserves. Potential factors contributing to this trend include regulatory reforms, lower tax shields, a decline in investment […]
More than two decades under an authoritarian regime have left scars on The Gambia’s economic and social fabric, as witnessed by stagnating GDP per capita and widening gap compared to Sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 1). Still, the country has made progress since its democratic transition in 2017. Real GDP growth averaged 6.1% between 2017-2019 compared to […]
