All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore. Read Here | The New York Times
The pain is not confined to the car industry, for the shortage spans all sorts of chips, from the expensive, high-tech devices that power smartphones and data centres to the simple sensors and microcontrollers that have become a vital commodity… Read Here | The Economist
India’s giant outsourcing firms are facing a two-front challenge: protecting the health of millions of employees as the nation suffers the world’s worst Covid-19 crisis, and ensuring that their work continues as usual for the big Western companies on their client lists. Read Here | The Wall Street Journal
The global economy is entering unfamiliar territory. After a decade of worries about inadequate demand and spending power in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, signs of insufficient supply are now emerging. Read Here | The Economist
Despite COVID-19, remittance flows remained resilient in 2020, registering a smaller decline than previously projected. Officially recorded remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries reached $540 billion in 2020, just 1.6 percent below the 2019 total of $548 billion. Read Here | World Bank
The 2020s now appear likely to unfold as a typical postwar decade, with some emerging economies falling, others rising, and a few standing out as genuine stars. A few will continue to rise to prosperity through the tried-and-true method of export manufacturing. Read Here | Foreign Affairs
The prices of raw materials used to make almost everything are skyrocketing, and the upward trajectory looks set to continue as the world economy roars back to life. From steel and copper to corn and lumber, commodities started 2021 with a bang, surging to levels not seen for years. Read Here | Bloomberg
The most striking geopolitical feature of the past four years has not been bipolarity or multipolarity—or even great-power conflict. It has been the spectacle of major economies pursuing self-sufficiency and a partial retreat from globalization… Read Here | Foreign Affairs
This year’s recently released U.S. Treasury Foreign Exchange Report reads like Hamlet would read if we excluded the Prince of Denmark. In seeking the sources for world external imbalances and for global currency misalignments, the Treasury looks everywhere other than where the main source of these imbalances now resides. Read Here | The National Interest
The prospect of recovery from the COVID-19 crisis makes it all the more urgent to have a firm vision of how the burden of public debt can be reduced once the coronavirus has been vanquished. For this reason, every country must work on itself and strive to maintain budgetary discipline. Read Here | Project Syndicate
looking beyond borders 