I'm not a huge fan of arbitrary lines through country income levels to create income thresholds. That is because there is no obvious clustering of countries within the global (country-level) income distribution, and moving from one income status to another does not correlate with trend breaks or end...

In a new paper, Zack Gehan and I present scenarios for the global economy in 2050. These scenarios build on a forecast of economic growth built around income, population, education, and temperature. The process suggests a considerable degree of uncertainty about how the world will look in three de...

The Sustainable Development Goals commit the world to ending extreme poverty by 2030. More cautiously, the World Bank’s twin goals suggest it can help reduce extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. Neither goal can be accomplished unless the extreme poverty line is (finally) fixed rather than constant...

Forecasts of the future shape of the global economy, if they are at least somewhat accurate, can help planning and policy discussions in areas from global governance through business expansion plans. At the same time, this relies on forecasts in fact being somewhat accurate, and it’s a cliché that p...

Last week, the Biden administration nominated Ajay Banga, former head of Mastercard, as a candidate to be the next World Bank president. I welcome President Biden’s choice, because Banga is an exciting and well-qualified candidate. As with any nominee, I hope the Bank’s shareholders will consider hi...

I’m writing the links from my in-laws’ place in Northumberland this week. There are many joys of being out here: having a woods just behind the house to take my son for a walk in, good food and beaches and most of all, the wildlife. Previous visits have been enlivened by pine martens, weasels and he...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a deep global recession as the virus rapidly spread and governments restricted movements. The economic shock was compounded by widespread uncertainty among businesses and concerns about the risks of increasing financial sector distress limiting access to credit.