Growth

The Global Competitiveness Report 2016-2017 assesses the competitiveness landscape of 138 economies, providing insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity.
This year’s edition highlights that declining openness is threatening growth and prosperity. It also highlights that monetary stimulus measures such as quantitative easing are not enough to sustain growth and must be accompanied by competitiveness reforms. Final key finding points to the fact that updated business practices and investment in innovation are now as important as infrastructure, skills and efficient markets.
Switzerland, Singapore and the United States remain the three world’s most competitive economies.

The Agricultural Outlook 2016-2025 is a collaborative effort of OECD and FAO. It brings together the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations and input from collaborating member countries to provide an assessment of medium-term prospects of national, regional and global agricultural commodity markets. The Outlook provides supply, demand, trade and price estimates of major agricultural commodities for 41 countries and 12 geographical regions. The special theme chapter of this year’s edition focusses on the prospects and challenges of the agricultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prices for the main crops, livestock and fish products all fell in 2015, signalling that an era of high prices is quite likely over for all sub-sectors. Meat prices fell from record highs in 2014, dairy product prices continued declines that started in 2013 and 2014, while crop prices fell further from their peaks in 2012.The main factors behind lower prices have been several years of robust supply growth, weakening demand growth due to the overall economic slowdown, lower oil prices and further accumulation of already abundant stocks.

Growth prospects have weakened throughout the world economy. Global growth for 2016 is projected at 2.4 percent, unchanged from the disappointing pace of 2015, and 0.5 percentage point below the January forecast. Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) are facing stronger headwinds, including weaker growth among advanced economies and persistently low commodity prices, as well as lackluster global trade and capital flows. Divergences between commodity exporters and importers persist. Conditions remain markedly challenging for commodity exporters, which continue to struggle to adjust to the new era of depressed prices. In contrast, commodity importers are showing greater resilience to headwinds, although the expected growth windfall from low energy prices has been surprisingly modest. Global growth is projected to pick up slowly to 3.0 percent by 2018, as stabilizing commodity prices provide support to commodity exporting EMDEs. Downside risks have become more pronounced. These include deteriorating conditions among key commodity exporters, softer-thanexpected activity in advanced economies, rising private sector debt in some large emerging markets, and heightened policy and geopolitical uncertainties. While policy space for monetary and fiscal stimulus is narrow, structural reforms could boost growth both in the short and the long term.

Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Singapore, the Netherlands and the United States are leading the world when it comes to generating economic impact from investments in information and communications technologies (ICT), according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2016.

On average, this group of high-achieving economies at the pinnacle of the report’s Networked Readiness Index (NRI) economic impact pillar scores 33% higher than other advanced economies and 100% more than emerging and developing economies. The seven are all known for being early and enthusiastic adopters of ICT and their emergence is significant as it demonstrates that adoption of ICTs – coupled with a supportive enabling environment characterized by sound regulation, quality infrastructure and ready skills supply among other factors – can pave the way to wider benefits.

The transformation of the financial services industry is top-of-mind for everyone in the field and blockchain might be the hottest topic in the rapidly changing world of Fintech. But how can this technology really help financial firms? This report from World Economic Forum takes a pragmatic approach to answering this question.

The report builds upon the findings from Deloitte/World Economic Forum report Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services and looks at the impact of implementing distributed ledger technology across nine sectors of financial services. Our findings suggest this technology has the potential to “live-up to the hype” and reshape financial services, but requires careful collaboration with other emerging technologies, regulators, incumbents and additional stakeholders to be successful.

The objective of this report is to highlight new alternative sources of capital and examine their potential for broader industry disruption in the future. Not all of the trends highlighted in this report will find broad adoption. But collectively, they hold lessons that could point towards the shape of the whole industry to come. To achieve this objective, this report describes the principal new capital sources that have arisen over the past decade, examines their drivers, and explains their effects and importance for society.

The real incomes of about two-thirds of households in 25 advanced economies were flat or fell between 2005 and 2014. Without action, this phenomenon could have corrosive economic and social consequences.

Most people growing up in advanced economies since World War II have been able to assume they will be better off than their parents. For much of the time, that assumption has proved correct: except for a brief hiatus in the 1970s, buoyant global economic and employment growth over the past 70 years saw all households experience rising incomes, both before and after taxes and transfers. As recently as between 1993 and 2005, all but 2 percent of households in 25 advanced economies saw real incomes rise.

Yet this overwhelmingly positive income trend has ended. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, Poorer than their parents? Flat or falling incomes in advanced economies, finds that between 2005 and 2014, real incomes in those same advanced economies were flat or fell for 65 to 70 percent of households, or more than 540 million people (exhibit). And while government transfers and lower tax rates mitigated some of the impact, up to a quarter of all households still saw disposable income stall or fall in that decade.

Cities matter to the UK’s future. They are already concentrations of population and employment, and will be home to much of the country’s future population and economic growth. Cities are centres of commercial, cultural, institutional, and socia life. In short, they are both central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and the locations where broad social, environmental and economic changes play out in practice.
UK cities are highly diverse, each with a distinctive history and its own set of relationships with its neighbours and with central government.
This Foresight project has developed a broad evidence base and consulted local actors to understand challenges and opportunities from those most experienced in the issues affecting UK cities. The single theme which runs throughout this work is providing the best possible evidence for national and city level decision-makers.

The Pacific Alliance–an innovative pact among Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru–has unprecedented opportunity to capitalize on political changes in Brazil and Argentina and move the region into a new era of regional integration. A new publication by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center and the Bertelsmann Foundation, released just weeks ahead of the Alliance’s Sixth Presidential Summit in Chile, says that now is the moment for the Alliance to deepen engagement with Mercosur and build on efforts to strengthen financial market, energy, trade, and foreign policy coordination.

In the coming years, prosperity in Germany will have to be generated through technology and knowledge to an increasing degree. Technological progress will become the sole driver of growth in the long run as growth contributed by labour and capital declines in the face of demographic change.
Germany must now chart the course for this transformation.

Radical technological change will slash marginal costs, opening up completely new business models. This will change value added in key sectors including mobility, healthcare and energy, and increase integration with services.

Germany must take more concerted action than it has so far to set the course for industrial policy going forward. Although Germany still boasts a range of outstanding benefits as a business location, it must tackle weak points in the start-up environment, venture capital, public investment and regulatory parameters for key technologies.

The strategic priorities of German industrial policy must continue to be the deepening of the European single market and the international trade and investment regime. Bilateral and multilateral trade policy has moved into rougher waters while the untapped potential right here in the European Union
is wholly underestimated.

In the digital world too, a good balance must be found between productivity and social cohesion. While this vision is still forming on the horizon, the political course taken now will determine whether it will turn into a positive or a plaintive reality.