The Policy Center through our former team members' testimonials

Last week Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, unexpectedly announced his resignation, effective as soon as next month and three and a half years prior to the end of his second mandate. Given the current environment of challenged and weakened multilateralism, the aftermath of his succession has a relevance that transcends the limits of that institution. While an analyst has alluded to President Kim as “voting with his feet” on the World Bank's loss of significance in investme ...

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an international trade and development strategy. Launched in 2013, it is one of the ways China asserts its role in world affairs and captures the opportunities of globalisation. The BRI has the potential to enhance development prospects across the world and in China, but that potential might not be realised because the BRI’s objectives are too broad and ill-defined, and its execution is too often non-transparent, lacking in due diligence and ...

“The most severe setback since the rise of Fascism in the 1930s” The football players at the beach of Essaouira are moving barefoot through the sand, at times entangled in a clumsy ballet of bodies and legs, moving from a pas de deux to a pas de vingt deux, a movement neither choreograph, Balanchine, nor composer, Strawinski, ever created. These athletes, a few fishermen among them, are competing with the ghosts of Ronaldo, Neymar or Messi. The kids are not different from the India ...

Good connectivity within cities is an essential input for productivity and livability in cities, but the distributive impacts of improvements in within-city mobility are not well understood. This work aims at filling this gap by exploring the impacts of alternative infrastructure investments and mobility policies on economic growth, income distribution of households and internal distribution of economic activity. This paper focuses on the estimation of the impacts of transportation ...

O artigo apresenta os resultados dos efeitos sistêmicos da mudança no padrão da produtividade agrícola entre 2008 e 2015. Para isso foi utilizado um modelo de equilíbrio geral computável (EGC) com especificação detalhada do uso da terra. Tal análise representa avanços no sentido de contribuir tanto para a modelagem econômica com uso da terra quanto na investigação dos impactos econômicos sistêmicos da mudança no padrão espacial da produtividade agrícola no Brasil. Os resultados indi ...

If you haven't read Part 1 of Cyberwarfare, click here.   “THIS WEAPON WILL NOT BE PUT BACK IN THE BOX” In March 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security warned critical infrastructure operators of Russian cyberspace attacks targeting industrial control systems. Particularly endangered would be nuclear facilities, energy and water. Just recently, the Marriott /Starwood hotel chain revealed that hackers plundered 327 million guest files, including passport numbers and credit ca ...

La domination de la Chine dans la production de terres rares illustre la compétition qui se joue autour des ressources minérales dans un monde toujours plus axé sur le numérique et le bas-carbone. Au cours des deux dernières décennies, la Chine a été à l’origine de 80 à 95 % de la production mondiale de terres rares, un groupe de 17 métaux devenus des éléments-clés de progrès technologiques révolutionnaires dans les domaines de l’énergie, des TIC, des dispositifs médicaux ou encore ...

Morocco has moved towards a more flexible exchange rate system, by widening its currency fluctuation bands to +/- 2.5% around a central price. This transition will, in time, equip the Moroccan economy with a macroeconomic instrument acting as a shock absorber and facilitating rapid adjustment at lower costs. In the absence of such a mechanism, adjustment to macroeconomic shocks at times requires a contraction in demand and thereby a cyclical downturn in growth to restore external ba ...

China’s dominance in the production of rare earth elements symbolizes the competition for once obscure sets of mineral resources in our increasingly digital, low carbon world. For the last two decades China has produced between 80 and 95 percent of the world’s rare earths – a group of 17 metals that have become key components of revolutionary technological progress in fields ranging from energy, to ICT, to medical devices, to defense. Despite their name, rare earths are not rare, an ...