Winners and Losers: The Macroeconomic Effects of Falling Energy Prices

A 2023 United Nations progress report (UN, 2023) showed that, of the 169 targets that make up the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), only 15% are on track, and progress on many has either stalled or regressed. The Water-Energy-Food nexus approach has highlighted the utmost importance of understanding the interconnections between systems in order to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. In this policy brief, we use the lessons learned from the water sector through a case study f ...

The world food price index collected for the last 60 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hit its highest record in March, declining gently in April. Pandemic, war and death in Ukraine, and droughts in the last 2 years… Such a combination looks apocalyptical. Now it is adding global hunger risks, because of the food price crisis. The rise in global food prices started in mid-2020 because supply chain disruptions triggered food stockpiling. Mobility r ...

The war in Ukraine is bringing substantial financial, commodity price, and supply chain shocks to the global economy. Sanctions on Russia are already having a significant impact on its financial system and its economy. Price shocks will have a global impact. Energy and commodity prices—including wheat and other grains—have risen, intensifying inflationary pressures from supply chain disruptions and the recovery from the pandemic. The push toward relative deglobalization received fro ...

The pandemic is accelerating history, in the sense that it is leading to the speeding up of some recent trends. In the case of globalization, the pandemic will not reverse it, but it will reshape it. Here we take a bird’s eye view of global trade during the pandemic, relate it to previous trends, and guess how global value chain managers and government trade policymakers are likely to react. A Bird’s Eye View of Global Trade during the Pandemic World trade took a deep dive during ...

- There are three possible justifications for central banks to engage with climate change issues: financial risks, macroeconomic impacts, and mitigation/adaptation policies. - Regardless of the extent to which individual central banks take action in each of the three areas, they can no longer ignore climate change. Last year, extreme weather events associated with climate change – floods, violent storms, droughts, and forest fires –occurred on all inhabited continents. In at least ...

This note approaches the relationship between natural wealth and economic growth, using the case of Sub-Sahara African economies as an illustration. Delving into recent World Bank reports, it highlights how a sustained positive correlation between natural capital and GDP growth happens through the transformation of the former into other forms of assets: produced capital, human capital and other intangible assets. Governance features and the quality of macroeconomic policies are of t ...

Les cours des matières premières ont, une fois encore, été marqués par une importante volatilité en 2017 et 2018. Si de nombreux facteurs économiques permettent de l’expliquer, la raison politique fut également bien présente. Les Annual Report tensions commerciales entre la Chine et les États-Unis on Commodity et, plus globalement, la montée des incertitudes ont pesé Analytics and sur les perspectives macroéconomiques mondiales et sur Dynamics « le dynamisme des marchés ». Comptant ...

The author of this blog, Ahmed Rachid El Khattabi, is an alumnus of the 2018 Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders program Rapid urbanization and climate change are two of the biggest challenges for cities. As much of the world is urbanizing, cities are growing thirstier, constantly seeking out new water supplies to keep up with demand. These challenges are especially significant for many growing cities that, due to historical reasons, are not located near water resources. Climate ch ...

Rarement, autant qu’en 2018, les marchés mondiaux de matières premières et de commodités auront été lle jouet non pas des tendances des « fondamentaux » (offre/demande et leur évolution), mais bien des convulsions d’une situation géopolitique mondiale qui, sous la houlette quelque peu déréglée des États-Unis de Donald Trump, a été particulièrement imprévisible. En effet, si 2018 restera dans les annales des marchés, c’est bien parce que les matières premières se sont retrouvées au p ...

Depuis la fin de l’année 2017, le président Donald Trump mène plusieurs batailles commerciales, contre différents partenaires, sous prétextes de sauver des emplois industriels américains et de réduire le déficit commercial des États-Unis. S’il est difficile de se prononcer sur les effets des combats commerciaux amorcés par le président Trump, l’importance des opposants et des échanges pour l’économie mondiale en fait une source de risque pour la croissance, les emplois et les prix à ...