Economy

Global imbalances are back—and this time the risks look different. The 2008 financial crisis showed how persistent current-account deficits and surpluses between major economies can fuel financial instability and trigger sudden, severe reversals of capital flows. After almost two decades, many thought that episode had been resolved. It had not. New imbalances have built up, with a familiar cast: China, Germany, Japan, and oil exporters running large surpluses, and the United States ...

History devotes considerable attention to the rise and fall of great powers. Scholars have spent centuries analyzing why empires collapse, why nations decline, and why dominant states eventually lose their position. By comparison, relatively little attention has been devoted to a different question: what happens when a country succeeds beyond its own expectations? ...

This article draws in part on perspectives shared by members of the Rihla Initiative for Green Economic Growth, whose regional insights helped inform the sections on how the costs of the war are being felt across the Global South. The war on Iran and in the Gulf has made it impossible to treat the Strait of Hormuz as a regional issue. The disruption around the Strait has moved through the world economy in concrete ways, from higher fuel bills and pressure on food and fertilizer ...

This essay argues that the current debate about the future of the international monetary system is not really about Gulf currencies, oil pricing, or de-dollarization in the narrow technical sense. It is about something deeper and more important: whether institutional trust can survive when geopolitical certainty is eroding.The Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—increasingly exist in a world where the United States no longer looks ...

The global energy system has entered a period of acute structural stress following the strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran in late February 2026, and the subsequent disruption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz. According to the International Energy Agency, the resulting shock marks the most severe disruption to global energy markets since the 1970s oil crises, with systemic characteristics comparable to the combined effects of those crises and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine ...

Depuis le lancement de GPT-4 en mars 2023, un discours de plus en plus en vogue affirme que « si vous ne maîtrisez pas l'Intelligence artificielle (IA) vous serez dépassé ». On parle de prompt engineering comme s'il s'agissait d'une compétence ésotérique réservée à une élite technologique. Les réseaux sociaux professionnels regorgent de profils qui se présentent comme « experts en IA » après avoir suivi une formation de deux semaines. L'alarmisme fait vendre, et ...

This Opinion was originally published on dev-front.org, by Hafez Ghanem, Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South.Joe Studwell has spent most of his career working on Asia and brings an interesting fresh perspective on the economics of Africa. This makes the book worth reading even if one disagrees with some conclusions.   The book’s main argument is that Africa should follow the Asian model of first focusing on smallholder agriculture, then labor intensive manufact ...

In 2017, eight scientists from the Google research team published in the journal Advances in Neural Info Processing Systems the remarkable article “Attention is all you need,” which introduced a Transformer neural network architecture. The paper has been cited over 173,000 times and ranks among the top 100 most cited papers of the 21st century. It builds on the attention principle introduced in 2014 by Bahdanau, Cho and Turing Award winner Bengio, who proposed neural machine transla ...

Le monde du travail est engagé dans un processus de mutation sans précédent. La quatrième révolution industrielle, portée par l’intelligence artificielle (IA) et la robotisation, a été le point de commencement d’une ère nouvelle où les repères économiques et sociaux se redéfinissent à une vitesse inédite. Ces technologies suscitent un engouement légitime et offrent des perspectives prometteuses, mais requièrent une vigilance accrue face aux incertitudes qui les entourent.Bien que, à ...

The energy shock caused by the war between the United States and Israel and Iran has highlighted the need for Africa to refine more of its own crude oil. Africa is a net hydrocarbon exporter, but remains stuck in the old colonial economic model: it mostly exports raw materials and imports refined products. Africa exports about 2.6 billion barrels of crude oil every year, and imports about 1.4 billion barrels of refined products. This is a problem for two reasons. First, Africa ...