Sterling traded at $1.3545, slipping 0.2% after data showed the British economy stagnated in July. The dollar inched higher on Friday after falling the day before as a surge in U.S. jobless claims and a modest tick up in inflation kept investors zeroed in on likely Federal Reserve interest rate cuts next week and beyond. […]
Sri Lanka’s agriculture sector grew by 2% in the second quarter from a year earlier. Sri Lanka’s economy grew 4.9% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2025, official data showed on Monday, indicating a strengthening recovery from its worst financial crisis in decades. Sri Lanka’s agriculture sector grew by 2% in the second quarter from […]
The 2025 US tariff increases varied significantly across most economies. This column argues that the economic impact of these tariffs will also not be uniform. Using a multi-sector, multi-region computable general equilibrium model, it estimates that US real GDP will decrease by around 4%, and that larger adverse impacts are expected in Canada and Mexico. […]
While economists have extensively studied gender norms affecting women, masculinity norms – the informal rules that guide and constrain the behaviours of boys and men – remain underexplored. This column reviews how such norms can shape economic outcomes in labour markets, health, education, households, and politics. Drawing on new survey data from 87,000 individuals across […]
Many communities in the US, especially those in rural areas, have limited access to healthcare. For example, some areas have significantly fewer doctors per capita than others, which might contribute to geographic inequities in health outcomes. This column discusses new research that shows how government designations of Primary Care Health Professional Shortage Areas – and […]
Businesses use checklists to exercise managerial control and ensure quality, but excessive bureaucracy can frustrate skilled workers and reduce morale. This column presents a randomised control trial in a German bakery chain that removed two time-consuming, non-essential checklists in selected stores. After abolishing the checklists, sales rose by 2.7%, customer ratings improved, and qualified workers […]
China’s growth model has continued to rely on expanding industrial capacity and exporting to the world, rather than on domestic consumption. This has lead to a significant increase in China’s global share of manufactured exports and has raised concerns about overcapacity (Figure 1; Xu, 2025). The imbalance arises because China’s expanding production capacity is outpacing […]
The new Trumpian tariffs are not the familiar protectionism G7 nations have applied for decades. Instead of shielding particular sectors, they wall off the entire American goods-producing economy from foreign competition. This is precisely the logic of 20th-century import substitution industrialisation – a strategy widely tried, and widely abandoned, because it raised costs, bred inefficiency, […]
The current US administration’s approach to financial markets and institutions mixes familiar deregulatory policies with a range of other policies that are largely without precedent. This column, taken from a CEPR book on the economic consequences of the second Trump administration, catalogues the relevant policy shifts that are likely to affect the financial sector and […]
Industrial policy is increasingly implemented worldwide, with many policymakers and researchers highlighting its benefits. However, the cost of industrial policy remains less understood. Using Chinese firm-level data, this column shows that higher industrial subsidies raise the likelihood and severity of foreign anti-dumping and countervailing duties at each investigation stage. These retaliatory tariffs wipe out roughly […]
