Low Interest Rates: An Opportunity for Renewables
Pierre Monnin | 8 July 2015
Monetary,
Blog | Tags:
Energy,
Interest Rates
Putting the economy on an environmentally sustainable path requires a serious shift into green technologies. Such a shift includes substantial investments in technologies that are based on renewable energy to produce electricity – referred to hereinafter as “green energy technologies”. Interest rates directly and significantly
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Where Will All The Jobs Come From?
Tom Berliner | 24 April 2015
Trade,
Blog | Tags:
Employment,
Global Value Chains,
Services Trade
In the last couple of years, a spate of magazines, articles and think-pieces have predicted a new age of automation (and robots) – one that means an increasingly stark picture for labour worldwide (see the BBC and The Economist). Even Barack Obama has been seen
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Central Banks, Financial Stability and Inequality
Pierre Monnin | 9 March 2015
Monetary,
Blog | Tags:
Central Banks,
Financial Stability,
Inequality
When you ask a central banker what her job is, she will most probably answer: “keeping inflation under control!” Indeed, securing price stability constitutes the current raison d’être of most, if not all, central banks around the world. In parallel to this objective, however, many
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Should the ECB Helicopter Adjust Its Dropping Zone?
Pierre Monnin | 4 February 2015
Monetary,
Blog | Tags:
Inequality,
QE
“Let us suppose that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1000 in bills from the sky…” This pleasant image conveyed by Milton Friedman’s famous metaphor is taken to new heights by Mario Draghi, who promised to inject €60 billion
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Inside CETA: Unpacking the EU-Canada free trade deal
Aaron Cosbey | 12 December 2014
Trade,
Blog | Tags:
Employment,
Environment,
ISDS,
Subsidies
How are sustainable development objectives treated in the latest major preferential trade agreements? In late September, the European Union and Canada released the long-awaited text of a bilateral free trade pact, five years after launching talks, and almost one year on from announcing they had
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Monetary Policy and Inequality – What Do Central Bankers Say?
Pierre Monnin | 24 November 2014
Monetary,
Blog | Tags:
Central Banks,
Inequality
“Benign neglect” perhaps most aptly characterizes the attitude that central bankers have traditionally displayed toward the topic of economic inequality. Indeed, monetary policy and inequality have long been regarded as having nothing more in common than just the fact that they both coexist. In the
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At Whose Service? Jobs and Services Trade in Developing Countries
Johannes Schwarzer | 17 November 2014
Trade,
Blog | Tags:
Development,
Employment,
Poverty,
Services Trade,
WTO
Services-led Employment Growth? Creating jobs to match their ever increasing, relatively young labor forces is probably the biggest challenge that developing countries are facing in the medium term. Reducing unemployment is perhaps the most effective tool to achieve a wide range of development goals, such
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Asia’s Poor Increase by One-Billion Overnight
Jean-Pierre Lehmann | 16 September 2014
Trade,
Blog | Tags:
G20,
IMF,
Poverty,
Trade,
WTO
The news has been exceptionally bad recently: carnage in the Middle East, race riots in the US, ongoing recession in the Eurozone and Japan, tension in the South China Sea, high youth unemployment virtually everywhere, the Ebola epidemic and so on and so depressingly forth.
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Growth Escalators and Growth Convergence
Ejaz Ghani | 5 September 2014
Trade,
Blog | Tags:
Development,
Services Trade
This article was first published on VoxEU.org and is republished with permission. The literature on global growth convergence and divergence is vast and deep. And it is still evolving. Some have argued that global growth is actually diverging across countries. Pritchett (1977) called this “divergence,
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TTIP and Jobs: Does the Emperor Have Clothes?
Johannes Schwarzer | 21 August 2014
Trade,
Blog | Tags:
Employment,
Services Trade,
TTIP
With negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in full swing, policymakers across the Atlantic are reiterating calls for more support of an agreement. In the wake of increasing public criticism of the plans for a deal, notably in Europe, policymakers are under
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