Daniel DeRock exposes the shaky foundations of macroeconomic statistical methods – from GDP figures to debt measurement – and argues for a fundamental rethinking of how scholars and policymakers engage with quantitative indicators.
Illicit financial flows have staggering consequences for global health and development in the world’s poorest countries. Existing policies address this issue but their success is limited by a paradigm of centralization. Blockchain and mobile technologies have enabled new policy possibilities around a paradigm of decentralization and disaggregation to a wider range of stakeholders.
Debt fueled consumption lay at the heart of the global financial crisis of 2008. Now ten years later, rising household debt in developed economies remains a significant issue. In this article Babatunde Valentine Onabajo proposes a novel solution: making individual credit scores public.
Fossil fuel subsidies are bad. Bad for government budgets. Bad for the economy. And bad for the climate. While reform efforts have focused on cutting consumer subsidies, those for production remain prevalent. To realize global climate ambitions, the G20 has to get serious and end producer subsidies.
International trade is under strain and backward-looking trade negotiation strategies play a role in building up this pressure. Drawing on the World Input-Output Database, Andrea Andrenelli adopts a global Leontief approach and develops three indices to make trade policymaking fit for the era of global value chains.
The rise of populism and the growing political polarization in advanced economies has exposed the phenomenon of spatial inequality. Globalization and digitalization amplify spatial inequalities by further concentrating “gains” and “losses.” For policymakers, confronting this complex problem without promising a “return to the past” is the challenge of our time.