Economic Divergence Gone Awry
It is the second year running in which the IMF and the World Bank have been forced by the Covid pandemic to hold their annual Spring Meetings online. But this time there was slight cause for optimism. Signs of a…
Worrying Spike in Global Food Prices
Having recovered from their lows touched early or mid-2020, food prices are rising fast. At $574.8 a metric tonne in February 2021, the price of soyabean was 53 per cent higher than the corresponding month of 2020, when the effects…
Hunger, again
The world has been preoccupied with the Covid-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies…
Four Ways Biden can Boost the Global Economy
The US is nowhere near as economically dominant as it was even a decade ago. Yet President-elect Joe Biden can take several relatively simple steps that would have far-reaching benefits for the US economy, the American people, and the rest…
Prepare for a Surge in Global Inequality
The United States prepares for moving out of the Trump era with the incoming President promising more rounds of stimulus spending to revive an economy ravaged by Covid-19. Other members of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, a predominantly…
Little value from Global Chains
On December 12, in an outburst of suppressed anger, workers employed at a factory assembling iPhones in Narasapura near Bengaluru ransacked its premises and damaged parked vehicles. The facility is a unit of Wistron, a Taiwanese vendor engaged in assembly…
Firing a Warning Shot across Big Tech’s Bows
It was a long time coming, but the day of reckoning for the big digital companies may finally have arrived. Despite the growing monopoly power of big tech and their use of anti-competitive practices, earlier attempts to regulate them (such…
RCEP and China: A deal that can make a difference
A month after the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement among 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific, speculation on what could be its economic and strategic fallout has waned. Attention seems to have been diverted by the more…
Vaccine Apartheid
Because a pandemic can be overcome only when it is overcome everywhere, embracing an every-country-for-itself approach would seem irrational. And yet, as the unseemly competition for vaccine doses indicates, that is exactly what many countries have done. The American pharmaceutical…
The Remittance Shock
The fall in remittance flows following the loss of migrant jobs in leading host countries has been among the many adverse effects of the Covid crisis on developing countries. While there have been job losses across the board in regions…