News
From World War Trade to domino regionalism: The emergent global trading order
1+ hour, 44+ min ago (1057+ words) Editor's note: This column presents the author's recent CEPR eBook, "World War Trade: Conflict, Containment, and the Emergent World Trading System," which is downloadable for free here. If tariffs were missiles, 2 April 2025 would be remembered as the day a world…...
From free rider to innovator: How China became a global pharmaceutical powerhouse
1+ day, 11+ hour ago (649+ words) This logic, while sound in theory, is increasingly difficult to square with recent developments in China. A decade ago, China barely registered in global pharmaceutical innovation. Today, it is a serious contender at the frontier. Understanding how this happened, and…...
Pitting migrants against babies: Why it does not make (economic) sense
2+ day, 11+ hour ago (449+ words) The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 (OECD 2025c) presents simple projections that investigate the economic consequences of the demographic transition. These combine the medium scenario of UN population projections (United Nations 2024) with employment rate projections, obtained assuming constant unemployment rates and entry and…...
The geography of science
4+ day, 10+ hour ago (185+ words) Figure 1 Trends in the geography of science Figure 2 Dynamics by field of study Bedekovics, G and W Ragland (2025), "Mapping Federal Funding Cuts to U.S. Colleges and Universities." Branstetter, L G and Y Ogura (2005), "Is academic science driving a surge in industrial…...
War and the lost generation of inventors
5+ day, 10+ hour ago (531+ words) One question that has garnered considerable interest from economists and policymakers alike is: what happens to innovation when societies experience events such as wars, demographic shocks, and mass migrations? In a new working paper (Repetto et al. 2026), we examine this…...
The Bank of England's capital mistake?
5+ day, 23+ hour ago (225+ words) "When you look at the world now, does it look more uncertain or less uncertain?" In December 2025, the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) answered that question by cutting the equity capital requirement for UK banks. David Aikman (NIESR)…...
Chris Sims’ contribution to economics
6+ day, 10+ hour ago (266+ words) Macroeconomics and reality (Sims 1980): The Wall Street Journal obituary for Chris had an apt title: "Christopher Sims, Economist Who Taught the Data to Speak." VARs indeed taught the data to speak to economists about macroeconomic dynamics, and the language was…...
How interest rates affect spending: Household debt and the role of asset prices
1+ week, 10+ hour ago (331+ words) So why do interest rates matter for spending, if at all? Figure 1 Propensity of interest rate reset around mortgage refinancing month Figure 3 Cash-on-hand and spending impulse responses to a one-percentage-point interest rate increase Figure 4 Borrowing and spending impulse response by…...
Preparing for a New G20 Alignment
1+ week, 10+ hour ago (622+ words) Coalition-based governance offers an alternative. It allows subsets of countries to advance cooperation in specific domains while maintaining an overarching framework for coordination. Such arrangements are already emerging in areas such as climate clubs and digital partnerships. The task for…...
Business investment in the era of digital transformation
1+ week, 4+ day ago (458+ words) Business investment has been disappointingly weak across the OECD since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which has contributed to slow potential growth and stagnating living standards, particularly in large parts of Europe (Draghi 2024, Andre and Gal 2024). Some of this weakness…...