Aposto Finance

This is the moment to articulate a reform agenda that is ambitious enough to give the Global South real hope for the future.

While debt has risen across advanced and developing economies alike, the problem is most acute in low- and middle-income countries where debts were already too high before the COVID-19 pandemic. Worse, offering relief to these societies has become harder than ever.

Supposing that tensions don’t return to these highly volatile markets, the baseline effect (that’s to say, with the transitory effects removed) in the months to come will be ever more favourable, thus lowering global inflation.

An old finance-industry heuristic and recent developments in the real economy may have weakened the pessimists' case.

By Dani Rodrik, Reza Baqir, and Ishac Diwan

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, different countries adopted different strategies, depending on their respective cultural and historical traditions. While China's top-down authoritarian strategy initially seemed effective, the regime's zero-COVID policy ultimately proved to be fatally flawed.

For 70 years after World War II, global growth was underpinned by ongoing efforts to boost international trade by eliminating self-defeating trade barriers. Sadly, the United States started dismantling this source of shared prosperity under Donald Trump, and it has now accelerated the process under Joe Biden.