At the curtain raiser for this year’s World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva issued a stark warning. The resilience national economies have been showing in the face of global disruption she had lauded last autumn is being severely tested. The most glaring issue she highlighted was trade policy uncertainty, which by the indicators the IMF tracks has broken the chart.
That’s not all of course. Trade and logistics routes are facing disruption from actual and potential conflict as well as policy uncertainty. Populations in different countries are changing at dramatically different rates, with populations in most richer economies aging rapidly while in much of the Global South the opposite is occurring, with attendant pressures on labor markets and public services. Finally, rapidly shifting migration policy globally alongside increases of involuntary migration are both likely to have spillover effects.
All of this in the face of growing public debt around the world and uncertainty about what job markets will look like this year as new technologies get more widely adopted. Our resilience will be tested, Georgieva warned us, so the trick is to be proactive about it and build additional resilience—not just for the dangers outlined by the IMF, but for the possibility of worse and more in the years to come.
What does economic resilience look like in our shared future, and how can we go about building it? To help us think about this question, Diplomatic Courier asked its expert community for their analysis, touching in particular on themes such as stakeholder participation, multisectoral approaches, models of leadership and success, and digital/financial inclusion.
We hope this digital anthology of commentaries gives you some compelling food for thought as we look to build economic resilience against current and future shocks.
As ever, thank you for reading!
