Gold up 53% so far this year. Gold extended its historic rally to break above $4,000 an ounce for the first time on Wednesday, as investors piled into the safe haven to seek cover from mounting geopolitical uncertainty while betting on more U.S. interest rate cuts. Spot gold jumped 1.2% to $4,032.46 per ounce by […]
Infrastructure diplomacy has become a central arena for strategic competition. This column examines how China’s Belt and Road Initiative has reshaped Japan’s overseas infrastructure engagement and diplomacy with participants of the initiative. It finds that Japanese project counts fell and foreign leaders visited Japan less often. To be successful, Western initiatives such as Build Back […]
Commodity prices have historically been considered leading indicators of inflation, but the relationship has weakened since the mid-1980s, making them less reliable predictors. This column analyses more than a million Reuters news articles between 2001 and 2023 to capture supply and demand dynamics in commodity markets. The findings show that text-based indicators of supply and […]
Geopolitical risk is a key concern for the euro area, yet most available measures reflect a US perspective. This column introduces a new indicator of geopolitical risk tailored specifically to the euro area, based entirely on newspaper coverage from local sources. The authors show that shocks to this index have significant recessionary and inflationary effects, […]
Amid geopolitical shocks, the EU is revisiting its industrial strategy. However, traditional metrics often paint a misleading picture of Europe’s underlying strength. This column uses a new approach to measure the EU’s relative state of technology in different sectors. It shows that although EU manufacturing broadly outperforms the rest of the world in productivity terms, […]
As global debt continues to climb, evaluating debt risks is critical. This column introduces a novel ‘debt-at-risk’ framework that uses information on current macro-financial and political conditions to construct the full distribution of potential future debt outcomes. The framework shows that debt risks are high, rising, and tilted to the upside. Debt levels are projected […]
Recent evolutions in US attitudes and policies have raised questions about the future of the dollar’s role in the global economy. This column explores a hypothetical scenario in which the world is deprived of the dollar as its global safe asset. In such a world, interest rates would be higher and more volatile. Liquidity would […]
Recent evolutions in US attitudes and policies have raised questions about the future of the dollar’s role in the global economy. This column explores a hypothetical scenario in which the world is deprived of the dollar as its global safe asset. In such a world, interest rates would be higher and more volatile. Liquidity would […]
Vikhsit Bharat : This is the ambitious goal India has set itself of becoming a high-income country by 2047. But reaching this goal will require India to grow almost 8 percent on average for the next 22 years. That would mean an acceleration from the 6.6 percent growth per year that India achieved over the last 25 […]
Geopolitical issues are flooding current political and economic debate, but evidence is limited on their interplay with structural policies. Combining information on geopolitical risks and the EU cohesion policy, this column evaluates the costs of geopolitical tensions in terms of reduced effectiveness of structural funds. The results indicate that the impact of the cohesion policy […]
