Dialogue Session - Vision on the World Political and Economic Prospects

Concerns are real, but the country fares as well as peers at similar levels of development China holds a paradox: Western policy-makers and many firms decry discriminatory business practices — concerns that have culminated in a trade war between the US and China — yet foreign direct investment (FDI) in China continues to thrive. In the first quarter of this year, FDI into China soared by 40% compared to the same period a year prior and, as reported by Unctad, the country overtook t ...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shock to both demand and supply, leading to the biggest collapse in world output since the Great Depression. Since late 2020, a more rapid than expected recovery has been observed. Five questions arise frequently. Here is my take on those questions. 1- Is the pandemic receding? No, but we have a vaccine to control it, and are better at managing it with selective measures, as distinct from total lockdowns, which kill the economy. The global number of ...

Le bilan des relations Europe/Méditerranée et Europe/Afrique invite aujourd’hui à un renouveau de ces partenariats. Un renouveau car il y a retrait partiel de l’Europe en ce qui concerne les questions de développement du voisinage Méditerranée-Afrique dans un temps où les partenariats actuels [de Barcelone et celui de Cotonou] s’emboitent dans la logique du commerce (libre-échange) et de l’aide financière. Le renouveau du partenariat Euro-méditerranée-Afrique devrait s’inscrire dans ...

We explore whether improved export sophistication increases women’s participation in wage employment. Using panel data from a large group of developing and emerging economies, and Fixed-effects and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators, we find that export sophistication has significant and mostly positive effects on women’s participation in paid employment in all regions, but these effects are nonlinear, since they become positive only after a threshold level of sophistica ...

L’Union européenne (UE) a annoncé le 14 juillet une proposition de taxe carbone à ses frontières, qui devrait renchérir les importations de produits fortement émetteurs (acier, aluminium, ciment, électricité et engrais). Cette même taxe est déjà appliquée au sein de l’UE, qui veut désormais l’imposer aux fabricants étrangers. En soi, le projet part d’une bonne intention. Il n’est pas motivé par le protectionnisme, mais par des préoccupations climatiques on ne peut plus justiíées. S ...

The world woke on Monday August 23 to higher international reserves for all countries. A new allocation of US$650 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to its member countries had entered into force (SDR450 billion). SDRs are an international reserve asset created by the IMF and added to countries' other foreign reserves. It is not a currency that can be used by private agents. Governments, on the other hand, can unconditionality exchan ...

Macroeconomic dynamics in the U.S. economy has increasingly become associated with asset price fluctuations in the past few decades. Financial conditions have increasingly become an influential factor shaping the cyclical pace of the macroeconomy. There has been a mismatch between rising financial wealth and the pace of creation and incorporation of new assets. Several secular stagnation hypotheses offer explanations for the insufficient creation of new assets. Public debt—and its p ...