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Agriculture Environment Featured News World

From farm to fork: boosting food security by fixing border bottlenecks

Imagine a truckload of fresh mangoes grown by smallholder farmers in Sri Lanka. The fruit is ripe, fragrant, and ready for export. But instead of heading straight to market, it sits at the border waiting for inspections, test results, and paper certifications. Hours turn into days. By the time the mangoes reach their destination, some […]

Technology Climate Environment Featured Finance

Time to be strategic: How public money could power Europe’s green, digital, and defence transitions

After the June NATO summit, Europe faces greater challenges in funding its green, digital, and defence transitions, as new defence commitments strain national and EU budgets. Balancing strategic priorities with debt sustainability is key. This column proposes a three-pronged strategy of (i) using existing fiscal tools, (ii) adopting additional national measures, and (iii) building a […]

Finance Business Economy Featured

The post-pandemic disinflation: Low sacrifice, high prices

By some criteria, the post-pandemic disinflation was a triumph for central banks in advanced economies: inflation fell sharply from 40-year highs while unemployment rates remained low, the combination of which generated historically low sacrifice ratios (output losses per inflation reduction). These standard metrics for success, however, ignore adjustments in the price level, which rose by […]

World Economy Featured trade

The time is right to make a European Union-India trade deal happen

Nearly 20 years have passed since the EU and India started negotiations on a bilateral trade and investment agreement. After seven years of intense negotiations, the process stalled in 2014, primarily because of the failure of the respective political leaders to make difficult choices. Talks restarted in 2022 and now offer a reasonable chance of […]

Climate Featured Innovation Productivity

Climate change, firms, and aggregate productivity

Policy debates around climate change frequently focus on the trade-off between the near-term costs of reducing carbon emissions and the long-term benefits of mitigating climate change. William Nordhaus highlighted the importance of aggregate productivity losses from climate change in shaping this intertemporal trade-off, but estimating these losses is challenging. This column examines both the direct […]

Climate Environment Featured News World

Global action without global governance: A four-pillar strategy for climate and nature

Advanced economies alone can no longer determine climate outcomes. Emerging and developing economies – home to two-thirds of current emissions and most of the world’s biodiversity – are now the decisive arena. For these countries to transition to low-carbon, nature-positive development paths rapidly and at scale, climate and nature strategies must be embedded in mutually […]

Economy Banking Featured Finance

Understanding country income: World Bank Group income classifications for FY26 (July 1, 2025–June, 2026)

Every year, the World Bank Group classifies the world’s economies into four income groups: low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high. These classifications, updated each year on July 1, are based on the previous year’s Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, expressed in U.S. dollars using the Atlas method.  The Importance of Income Classification A country’s income classification not only […]

Agriculture Environment Featured Healthcare

How accurately can we estimate the hidden costs of what we eat?

The world is seriously off track to meet global nutrition targets. In fact, in some countries, statistics are moving in the wrong direction. Stunting remains a widespread problem, with nearly 148 million children affected, while at the other end of the spectrum, millions of adults are either struggling with obesity or suffering from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). […]

trade Featured News World

A new modelling approach for evaluating the Trump tariffs

There is currently much discussion about President Trump’s tariffs, the US trade deficit, and its causes and impacts, but little in the way of economic modelling to inform the discussion. This column uses a theoretical model of international trade to demonstrate that the US trade deficit might be regarded as the consequence of rational market […]

Finance Economy Featured World

Rethinking exchange rate flexibility in the post-Bretton Woods era: Evidence from a new index

The collapse of the Bretton Woods system has traditionally been cited as heralding a major shift towards floating exchange rates. The extent of this transition has recently been challenged. This column introduces a new index of global exchange rate fixity which is invariant to country boundaries and accounts for indirect relationships. It finds that global […]