The world is in the midst of a debt crisis. A recent report estimates that 61 emerging-market and developing economies – nearly one-third of the International Monetary Fund’s member countries – are fa ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-28
Climate policy is at a critical juncture. The world’s leading scientists see a rapidly closing window to avoid the worst ravages of global warming. With the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act (I ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-27
With the shutdown of its last three nuclear power plants, Germany has completed its phase-out of nuclear power. As the minister responsible for nuclear safety in Germany, I believe that this was an ex ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-24
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last month seemed to bode ill for the global clean-energy race. Just as recently enacted US investment packages and the rest of President Joe Biden’s climate dreams ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-18
The Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group (WBG) and the International Monetary Fund, which kicked off on April 10 in Washington, provide an opportunity to reflect on the Bank’s ongoing evolution. As ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-18
Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s recent meeting in Moscow, and China’s apparent success in brokering a diplomatic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia have fueled renewe ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-17
No one seems to know how the United States would react if China were to invade Taiwan. For decades, US leaders did all they could to avoid this question. Then, in September of last year, President Joe ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-14
Voluntary markets for carbon offsets have recently come under fire, with critics questioning the efficacy of contracts that aim to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide relative to what would have happene ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-11
After years of global climate-policy leadership, the European Union is looking warily at the United States’ sudden embrace of ambitious clean-energy subsidies. Ultimately, America’s entry into the cle ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-11
In a world beset by crises, one is not getting nearly enough attention: the sovereign-debt emergency faced by half of the world’s emerging and developing economies. Fortunately, a new innovation in su ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-07
Reacting to Silicon Valley Bank’s sudden collapse, André Esteves, a senior Brazilian banking executive, recently told Bloomberg that “SVB’s interest rate risk would’ve been obvious to any banking inte ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-06
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a final warning to humanity: unless we halve greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2030, we will have no chance of capping global temperatur ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-04
The spectacle of the US Congress grilling TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on March 23 could one day be remembered as a turning point in the history of globalization. Over five hours of aggressive questioning, ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-03
Late last year, Morris Chang, the legendary founder of Taiwan’s (and the world’s) leading semiconductor producer, proclaimed that “globalization is almost dead.” In a world where supply chains have be ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-03
The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 was met by an equally swift response from US regulators, who announced plans to make whole all depositors, including the uninsured. But the SVB f ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-31
An easy way to start a long, heated debate is to mention global population. Thomas Malthus famously ignited furious arguments in the nineteenth century when he warned that, absent fertility-control po ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-31
The shotgun wedding of UBS and Credit Suisse was hastily arranged in the spirit of ensuring our collective safety. As Swiss National Bank Chair Thomas Jordan noted, Credit Suisse’s size and global net ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-29
When Edmundo, a waste picker in Peru, caught COVID-19, he had to take out a bank loan to pay for his visit to the clinic. Many of his colleagues also fell ill and subsequently went into debt, desperat ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-24
Together with air, water is arguably the planet’s most important natural resource. Functioning water systems are one of the technological pillars of civilization, which often makes a water crisis a ma ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-24
The world is becoming accustomed to the drip-drip of catastrophic headlines following each new climate-driven disaster. Increasingly frequent and severe heatwaves are causing wildfires in California a ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-23
