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Boosting capital for development – Here’s how to advance sustainable Foreign Direct Investment
Thursday 20th of January 2022
Foreign direct investment (FDI) can play an important role in delivering the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Investment flows can help advance a nation’s development goals by bringing capital, employment, export opportunities, greater consumer choice, advanced technologies, managerial know-how and overall economic growth.
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The world is drowning in data. Why don’t we trade it like on a stock exchange?
Wednesday 19th of January 2022
The digital revolution is flooding the world with data. By 2025, an astounding 175 zettabytes – that’s 175 trillion gigabytes – of new data is expected to be generated annually, a fivefold increase on 2018. Much of that data will end up sitting idle on servers and hard drives –unused, unanalyzed, and, perhaps worst of all, unshared.
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IMF: Global shipping costs are easing but pressures remain
Monday 17th of January 2022
Shipping costs soared over the past year as consumers unleashed pent-up savings to buy new merchandise while the pandemic continued to snarl the world’s supply chains. Container rates have more than quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, with some of the biggest gains concentrated in the first three quarters of last year.
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How Covid broke supply chains, and how AI and blockchain could fix them
Thursday 13th of January 2022
When the coronavirus crisis erupted in 2020, it became apparent that the medical emergency was accompanied by severe shortages, especially in some medical devices.
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3 ways digital currencies could change global trade
Thursday 13th of January 2022
Digital currencies are growing: the market is valued at more than $2 trillion and involves more than 15,000 varieties. In 2021, El Salvador even adopted Bitcoin as its legal currency.
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3 ways the MENA region can build a sustainable economic recovery
Monday 10th of January 2022
At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos two years ago, we discussed the need for MENA countries to unite as a trading bloc and how that represents an opportunity to add around $2.5 trillion in combined GDP to the wealth of the region.
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Supply chain resilience: How are pandemic-related disruptions reshaping managerial thinking?
Wednesday 22nd of December 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has tested the effectiveness of 20 years of research, debate and planning on supply chain resilience.
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How to improve digital economy regulation through increased transparency
Friday 10th of December 2021
Life is full of ironies. The internet was to herald an era of greater transparency and accountability of governments – putting more information in the hands of citizens. Yet, it turns out, the regulation of the digital economy is one of the least transparent policy domains. No international organization systematically tracks changes in laws, regulations and enforcement practice in this space. The media no longer has the resources for tasks like this. A few think tanks and researchers put out occasional reports. For law firms, policy surveillance is often just a marketing tool.
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Globalization and world trade bounce back from the impact of COVID-19: report
Tuesday 7th of December 2021
COVID-19 has not undermined globalization as much as some had predicted. Although travel and tourism have been hard hit, international trade has surged during the pandemic, according to a new study of global connectedness.
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This is how global car use could change between now and 2050
Tuesday 30th of November 2021
While car use is projected to fall in North America and Europe until 2050, Asia is the continent where the car as a mode of transportation is expected to become much more prevalent. In the next three decades, Asian car use is projected to climb to more than 40 percent of trips taken, up from just 28 percent in 2015.
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What to expect from the next WTO Conference
Monday 29th of November 2021
This article was previously published on 24 November 2021.
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5 ways a new WTO agreement will remove barriers to trade in services
Wednesday 24th of November 2021
Services account for two-thirds of global GDP, and more than six out of 10 jobs. In recent years, services export growth has outpaced sluggish growth in merchandise trade, and now accounts for almost half of overall trade measured in value-added terms.
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What South Korea’s vaccine industry success teaches us about global trade policy
Wednesday 17th of November 2021
South Korea: A global vaccine hub
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How women are staking out a space in the blockchain world
Friday 12th of November 2021
As an artist and women’s rights activist, Maliha Abidi is adept at using digital technologies, so when she came across non-fungible tokens she quickly figured they could be a way to reach more people, and for women artists to gain a bigger following.
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How logjams at LA’s ports highlighted the global supply chain crisis – and pointed to ways to fix it
Thursday 11th of November 2021
Flexport founder Ryan Petersen rented a boat in October 2021 and took a close look at the logjam choking the two busiest container ports in the US – Los Angeles and Long Beach. After a three-hour tour, he lit up Twitter with ideas to clear the bottleneck that’s disrupting America’s supply chain.
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Belt and Road green investment that delivers on climate action
Friday 5th of November 2021
Infrastructure developments play a key role as part of the global “build back better” narrative as well as contribute to the Paris Agreement on climate change. In order to maintain global economic growth at a level that meets the needs of a rapidly growing population, a massive global infrastructure investment of $66 trillion is needed in emerging economies before 2030.
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This is how COVID-19 has affected global trade
Friday 5th of November 2021
The year 2020 was marked by some of the largest reductions in trade and output volumes since WWII. The declines in both world industrial production and goods trade in the first half of 2020 were of similar depth to those at the trough of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, they materialised and disappeared more quickly, marking more of a V- shaped recovery in 2020. In addition, trade and production impacts across specific goods, services and trade partners were highly varied.
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From adversaries to allies: How trade reform built trust in Colombia
Friday 5th of November 2021
Regulation can sometimes feel like a stand-off, with government and business often finding themselves in intense, if not outright adversarial, relationships. The former has a responsibility to protect its citizens, while business seeks to deliver goods and services to customers as efficiently as possible. This tension can lead to mistrust, making regulatory reform an uphill battle.
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What longer delivery times say about global supply chains
Wednesday 3rd of November 2021
Supply chain disruptions have become a major challenge for the global economy since the start of the pandemic. Shutdowns of factories in China in early 2020, lockdowns in several countries across the world, labor shortages, robust demand for tradable goods, disruptions to logistics networks, and capacity constraints have resulted in big increases in freight costs and delivery times.
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How to make fragile global supply chains stronger and more sustainable
Tuesday 2nd of November 2021
In 2019, global supply chains moved more than US$19 trillion in exported goods. The production and sale of many items we need and use — including toys, clothes, food, electronics and home furniture — depend on global supply chains.
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Lost in transit: Major delays plague China-U.S. shipping
Tuesday 2nd of November 2021
While before the coronavirus pandemic, goods shipped between China and the U.S. via container ship took just over 40 days, hold-ups and delays have extended that time to upwards of 70 days in July, August and September of 2021. The delays are much longer than those at the beginning of the global coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, when transit time briefly spiked at 56 days.
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How to predict where blockchain regulation may be heading: an expert explains
Monday 1st of November 2021
Blockchain technologies offer great trust and transparency, without the need for a trusted third party. However, Blockchain’s platform nature, how its pricing works, and its impact into supply chains pose considerable risks for anticompetitive behaviour by users, the blockchain itself, or directed towards it.
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136 countries have agreed to a global minimum tax rate. Here’s what it means
Monday 1st of November 2021
A global deal to ensure big companies pay a minimum tax rate of 15% and make it harder for them to avoid taxation has been agreed by 136 countries, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Friday.
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Why venture capital needs to become more inclusive across Africa
Saturday 30th of October 2021
A former sugar trader in the City of London, Jihan Abass knows the sweet taste of success. One particular moment to savor for the 27-year old entrepreneur came in May 2021, when her Nairobi-based insurance tech startup, Lami, raised its first institutional financing round. Initially funded by personal savings, the company took in $1.8 million from investors who share the founder’s belief in the power of mobile technology to deliver financial products at scale to an underserved market.
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Why a focus on shareholders may be causing supply chain backups
Tuesday 26th of October 2021
The Dutch East India Company was probably the biggest corporation in history and frequently paid dividends to shareholders – sometimes in the form of cloves. That enduring largesse, even at the expense of investing in its sprawling trading business, is one reason cited for the company’s demise in the late 1700s.