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
The world is in the midst of a global permacrisis. As interrelated shocks – the war in Ukraine, the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the escalating US-China rivalry, climate change, and a looming fin ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-22
Fifty years ago this month, in March 1973, the Bretton Woods arrangement of fixed exchange rates was abandoned, and the world’s major currencies – including the US dollar, pound, yen, and Deutsche Mar ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-21
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in northern California and Signature Bank in New York are the largest bank busts since 2008. Regional and mid-sized bank stocks have tanked, and depositors and busi ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-17
Disruption is coming to the agriculture sector. Around the world, livestock farmers are leaving the land, policymakers are targeting the harmful environmental and social effects of industrial meat pro ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-16
The run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – on which nearly half of all venture-backed tech start-ups in the United States depend – is in part a rerun of a familiar story, but it’s more than that. Once aga ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-15
When the United States and its G7 partners imposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank and barred Western financial institutions from doing business with Russian counterparties, commentators warned of ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-14
As a maturing, cost-effective technology, electric vehicles (EVs) are a key part of the solution to planet-heating emissions. When paired with clean electricity, they offer a route to climate-neutral ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-13
We are at the halfway point for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (from 2015 to 2030), but we are not halfway to achieving them. In fact, in many critical areas – from poverty to food sec ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-13
In January, I expressed optimism that a recession across the Western world (and beyond) was becoming less likely, and high-frequency indicators since then have indeed supported a benign outlook. This ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-10
Recent months may well be remembered as the moment when predictive artificial intelligence went mainstream. While prediction algorithms have been in use for decades, the release of applications such a ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-09
In my view, the most profound and insightful work of political economy written in the 2010s was neither a journal article nor a monograph nor a book in the traditional sense. Rather, it was an online ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-09
The United States is in the midst of a book-banning frenzy. According to PEN America, 1,648 books were prohibited in public schools across the country between July 2021 and June 2022. That number is e ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-08
“What gets measured gets done.” It is a well-worn maxim, attributed to everyone from management guru Peter Drucker to physicist Lord Kelvin. Regardless of who said it first, the point is a crucial one ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-08
When US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, met in Bali last November, they agreed to hold high-level meetings to establish “guardrails” for the Sino-American strategic compet ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-07
US President Joe Biden deserves all the praise he received for his recent trip to Ukraine and Poland to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Biden’s ten-hour train ride from the ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-06
World leaders, diplomats, intelligence officials, and scholars convened in Germany in February for the annual Munich Security Conference amid a raging land war in Europe and heightened geopolitical te ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-06
