Samuel George with Daron Acemoglu for The Crossroads: a series on global economics from the Bertelsmann Foundation

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”President Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 This policy brief examines the economic and human impacts of the first six months of the Iran war—from February to the end of August 2026—on Iran’s Arab neighbors and compares these impacts with those on the three countries directly involved—Iran, Israe ...

Various competing cross-border payment networks have become vehicles for geopolitical competition. As tensions have risen, many countries want to secure access to cross-border payment systems by joining with like-minded countries to form interoperable networks, either via tokenization or Instant Payment Systems (IPSs). Three major projects are under development, serving the strategic interests of the US, China and the Rest of the World—corresponding to the three trading spheres taki ...

This paper was originally published as a chapter in the ISPI report The Pursuit of Smart Mobility in Urban Nodes: Trends and Innovation for Citizens and Freight. Agglomeration economies have historically supported industrialisation and global integration by concentrating firms, labour and infrastructure in dynamic urban cores. However, these same forces have also generated persistent patterns of territorial polarisation. Drawing on New Economic Geography, this chapter interpret ...

“A band-aid on a bullet hole!” That’s how Charlie McElligott, a cross-asset strategist at Nomura, described the maneuver carried out by United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on August 19. The U.S. Treasury Department announced that from September 9 to November 4, it would double the volume of long-term bond buybacks, going from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, with a focus on maturities of between 10 and 30 years. ...

Selon la dernière enquête nationale disponible, 57 % des femmes marocaines âgées de 15 à 74 ans, soit environ 7,6 millions de personnes, ont déclaré avoir subi au moins un acte de violence au cours des douze mois précédant l'enquête (HCP, 2019). Cette prévalence s'accompagne d'un coût économique direct et indirect estimé, pour la même période, à 2,85 milliards de dirhams (HCP, 2019). Ces deux ordres de grandeur — humain et économique — trouvent un écho dans les indicateurs du marché ...

Predictions of American decline have become increasingly prevalent. The United States has run persistent trade deficits for decades, but its public debt now exceeds its annual economic output. Meanwhile, and new centers of industrial and technological power continue to emerge across Asia. Yet despite these developments, no country has so far replaced the United States as the main organizing power of the international economy. Conventional explanations explain this in terms of U.S. m ...

This paper addresses the persistent challenge of resource dependence in the world's poorest countries, focusing on the ten poorest African nations where natural- resource rents average 14% of income. It argues that four decades of conventional policy advice, which treated resource dependence primarily as a revenue management problem, have failed to help these countries. While stabilization funds and permanent-income frameworks aim to smooth consumption, they do not answer the fundam ...

This policy paper explores how China’s economic development model—rooted in pragmatism, long-term planning, and civilizational renewal—has become its most compelling soft power asset, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. While critically engaging with Joseph Nye’s original conception of soft power as a primarily cultural and normative force, the paper argues that China’s ability to transform itself from an impoverished postimperial state into the world’s largest trading nat ...

This Opinion was originally published in Project Syndicate and republished by The Edge Malaysia, DT Next, and The Japan Times. Data from a period in which both China and India pursued deliberate industrial policies show that neither country's development route is accessible to other countries. At best, their experience can alert policymakers to structural limitations and coordination problems that will require their own homegrown solutions.RABAT—What is the most reliable develo ...