Globalization

The so-called BRICS have become a formidable collective force with a shared ambition to reshape the prevailing global order and bring about a multipolar world where power is distributed more…

In the aftermath of the Cold War, a global village was emerging, driven by a belief in market power and the surge of globalization in the 1990s. Governments relaxed travel,…

Although the global economic performance shows signs of improvement, growth remains fragile. Certainly, lower energy costs contribute to slowing down the rise in prices and this is good news for…

Background Global economic activity is expected to slow down because of record-high inflation, large public budget deficits and debts, conflicts between monetary and fiscal policy targets, and lower central banks’…

When President Joe Biden campaigned under the slogan “build back better,” he meant to break away from limited government and expand the role of the state in a variety of…

Today, the African economies face another economic crisis. Supply chains disruption, money printing, the questionable responses to Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, currency depreciation and years of economic mismanagement have…

The ECB Report on a digital euro states explicitly that a digital euro would support the role of the European Union as a sovereign entity and foster the international role…

According to the recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global average temperature increase over the period 1850–1900 was about 1.1°C by the 2010s. Several countries in the world have seen increases in average temperatures approaching 2°C. From 1820 to 2016, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in most of the Western world grew by about 25 times, and in the non-Western world by 13.5 times. This economic growth has been associated with enormous improvements in different indicators of human well-being, such as higher life expectancy, lower child mortality, and lower malnutrition.

The IFO Institute (Munich) has just revised its forecast for the German economy. GDP is now expected to grow 2.5%. IFO’s previous prediction was 3.3% and the prediction the European Commission put forward last Summer was 3.6% (Fig.1). However, according to IFO the economy will rise 5.1% in 2022 and thus bring the country back where it was before the Covid-19 shock.

In early 2011, an unprecedented wave of political uprisings swept the Arab world. It was the so-called Arab Spring. Protesters in several Arab countries took to the street and demanded changes in governments, freedom, bread, and dignity. The main slogan was “the people want to bring the regimes to an end.” The reasons that inflamed the uprisings across the region included excessive levels of corruption, police brutality, lack of political freedoms, low levels of income along with high income inequality, high levels of youth unemployment and, last but not least, dictatorial regimes.