During normal times, if the world’s petroleum producers announced an agreement to slash output, oil prices would immediately spike. During normal times, lower crude prices would boost economic growth. During normal times, low oil prices might be reason to celebrate. But if there is one fact we can agree on, it is that these are […]
After suffering severe labour shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems unlikely that advanced-economy farmers will return to business as usual. Instead, many will probably attempt to mitigate the risks stemming from dependence on foreign seasonal workers by automating more of their operations. Read Here – Project Syndicate
Governments around the world are wrestling with when — and how — to ease the restrictions designed to control the coronavirus pandemic amid rising unemployment and with many of their citizens struggling to make ends meet. Mandatory lockdowns to stop the spread of the new virus, which has so far infected almost 2.3 million people […]
Governments, in other words, are spending as if there will be zero economic output between now and sometime this summer…This level of spending has no precedent in history—not even close. Not in war. Not in peacetime. Not ever. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
An economy without crowds is not a “new normal.” It may be more like the new anomie, to borrow Émile Durkheim’s term for the sense of disconnectedness. For most people, the word “fun” is almost synonymous with “crowd.” The coming year will be a time of depression in the psychological as well as the economic […]
Under the assumption that the pandemic and required containment peaks in the second quarter for most countries in the world, and recedes in the second half of this year, in the April World Economic Outlook we project global growth in 2020 to fall to -3 percent. This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, […]
There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen… Read Here – Marginal Revolution
There’s a term for what’s been missing: “clioepidemiology.” Named after Clio, the muse of history, it describes the practice of studying information from past epidemics for advice about the present. Why are we so bad at doing this in practice? Isn’t everyone who’s ever lived through an ugly epidemic an armchair clioepidemiologist, almost by default? […]
The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus surged past 100,000 as the epidemic in the U.S. cut a widening swath through not just New York City but the entire three-state metropolitan area of 20 million people connected by a tangle of subways, trains and buses. Read Here – APNews
The COVID-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented threat to both public health and the global economy. Only by ditching nationalist rhetoric and policies, and embracing stronger international cooperation, can governments protect the people they claim to represent. Read Here – Project Syndicate
looking beyond borders 