While official statistics compiled by government agencies are still considered the most reliable, policymakers are increasingly using private data to get around their limitations. Claudia Sahm is a former principal economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and has studied the growing role of alternative data in monetary policy. In this po…

Price stability is the main goal for central banks, and monetary policy is how they achieve it. However, societies are always in flux, and central bankers who pay close attention to emerging trends are more likely to make better policy decisions. Bank of Korea Governor Chang Yong Rhee has expanded the scope of research to include structural issues …

Technology is often what drives big changes, but innovations like cryptocurrencies and blockchain are transforming the world of money at breakneck speed. While the volatility of digital currencies like Bitcoin has kept it out of traditional banking systems, stablecoin is gaining ground in the race for a suitable digital counterpart to fiat currency…

While artificial intelligence continues to outperform our human abilities in many areas, Pablo Peña believes critical thinking and curiosity are what will keep us in the driver's seat. AI can only draw on human-produced knowledge, Peña says, "The version of AI that we know now is only a sophisticated remix of what we know already." Peña is an assoc…

Maintaining good relations promotes trade, but can trade repair bad relations? Marc Palen examines how Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws in the mid-1800s sparked its interest in free trade and the idea of economic interdependence for a peaceful and prosperous world. Palen, an archaeologist, historian, and author, discusses his latest book, Pax Econ…

Sub-Saharan Africa is holding its own despite a deteriorating global trade and aid landscape. The latest outlook projects growth to remain steady at 4.1 percent this year with a modest pickup in 2026. While the region has once again proven its resilience, what will it take to realize its full potential? IMF Economist Athene Laws helps pull together…

It's not unusual for countries to reevaluate trade relationships as the global economy evolves. However, the persistent uncertainty brought on by tariffs has prompted entire regions to reconsider long-established alliances and rethink new ones that were unimaginable only a year ago. Gordon Hanson, international economist and Professor of Urban Poli…

While the US dollar has been at the top of its game for decades, new players are testing its reign. Chess grandmaster-turned-economist Kenneth Rogoff has long cautioned of the dangers that high debt and fiscal burdens could have on the world's favorite reserve currency, and in his latest book, Our Dollar, Your Problem, he says its share of global r…

The US is a breeding ground for startups, and California has been the center of that universe since the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. But rising costs, tighter quarters, and increasing bureaucracy have many tech innovators seeking greener pastures, well beyond Silicon Valley. Princeton University's Swati Bhatt has been studying the evolution of A…

While countries came together in the late 80s to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism, technology and the advent of virtual currencies have further complicated the tracking of illicit financial flows across borders. Over $51 billion in cryptocurrency was used by criminals last year to circumvent traditional banking regulations. Cha…

Bringing nations together to maintain peace and security and raise living standards for all seemed a utopian idea in the early 20th century. Still, geopolitics, economics and vision by world leaders eventually came together to make it a reality. But what happens when the great powers that have been supporting the multilateral system decide it's not…

A lot has happened in the global economy since 2019, and few people know that better than Gita Gopinath. As the IMF Chief Economist and subsequently the institution's First Deputy Managing Director, she navigated unprecedented global crises, including the pandemic and the ensuing great lockdown, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, inflation, and g…

As tech innovation, particularly in the field of AI, is increasingly focused on a few key players, the industries benefiting from these tools have also become more concentrated, which Carl Benedikt Frey says could weigh on growth. Frey is an associate professor of AI and Work at Oxford University, and his latest book, How Progress Ends, suggests th…

There was a time when economic expertise ruled policy debates at virtually all levels of government. And while trade, taxation, and other important policies are still guided by economic analysis, economists increasingly feel sidelined by politics. In her former roles as chief economist at the US Treasury Department and senior economist at the White…

Public resistance to new policies often leaves policymakers scratching their heads. What seems a perfectly reasonable policy to a government is often perceived by its citizenry as regressive. Stefanie Stantcheva's multidisciplinary approach to research digs deep into the minds of people at the receiving end to help design better policies. Stantchev…

Most advanced economies are witnessing their populations age and labor forces shrink, and the same trend is expected to hold for the largest emerging economies within the decade. So the largely touted demographic dividend of previous decades is making way for a demographic drag. Diaa Noureldin is an economist in the World Economic Studies division …

After four long years of numerous crises, sub-Saharan Africa's hard-won recovery has been disrupted by yet another shock. The sudden shift in the global outlook has clouded the region's short-term prospects and significantly complicated policy making. Economist Andrew Tiffin and his team produce the IMF Regional Economic Outlook for sub-Saharan Afr…

While the German economy has been one of Europe's strongest for decades, its performance in recent years has fallen short of expectations. Why is this once economic powerhouse now lagging? Ulrike Malmendier is a professor of economics and finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves on the German Council of Economic Advisors to the…

Malaysia is one of Southeast Asia's strongest economies and has recently been lauded for its ability to keep inflation in check. But Malaysia is not immune to the rising global trade tensions and uncertainty of late. In this podcast, IMF Asia and Pacific Department head Krishna Srinivasan sits down with Bank Negara Malaysia Governor Abdul Rasheed G…

After years of economic turmoil, Argentina's central bank chief has doubled down on efforts to restore confidence in the Argentine peso and normalize its economy. In this podcast, Governor Santiago Bausili and IMF Western Hemisphere Department head, Rodrigo Valdés discuss the challenging process of stabilizing Argentina's bi-monetary economy. The c…

Never underestimate the value of a good idea. Ideas are the starting point for innovation; few things fuel economic growth more than innovation. However, most of today's innovators emerge from a narrow demographic group with specific backgrounds, which Xavier Jaravel says creates the phenomena of "Lost Einsteins" and "Lost Marie Curies". Jaravel is…

Economists have long surmised that people's knowledge and skills contribute significantly to economic development, but to what degree can access to an education change lives? Amory Gethin has compiled data from surveys from more than 150 countries to measure what economists have never measured before: the correlation between education and individua…

While we like to think our financial decisions are based on logic, the truth is, they are largely driven by emotion. So when John Maynard Keynes looked for methods to measure economic fluctuations, animal spirits were a key ingredient. Karthik Sastry is a macroeconomist and assistant professor at Princeton University. In this podcast, he says perso…

Modern economics was built on ideas spelled out by Adam Smith in his 18th-century The Wealth of Nations. But while he used the term only once in that economic treatise, Smith is most remembered for "the invisible hand," a metaphor Oren Cass says has wrongly been associated with the idea that the pursuit of profit is always socially beneficial and t…

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association's Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a specia…

The pandemic was a brutal reminder of how crucial public health systems are, yet health budgets in many countries are still underfunded. Developing economies generally do not allocate sufficient domestic resources to health and external financing is becoming increasingly difficult to secure. Sanjeev Gupta is a senior policy fellow at the Center for…

Countries with better institutions are more prosperous. A truism perhaps, but then why are they so hard to build and sustain? That is the question that Simon Johnson has sought to explain since the fall of communism and the basis for the research that won him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Johnson, a former IMF chief economist, now a pr…

As urbanization continues to grow worldwide, affordable housing is a rare commodity in many cities. Sao Paolo­, South America's biggest city, has gained over 2 million new residents in the past decade alone. Elizabeth Johnson heads Brazil research at TS Lombard and has been studying Sao Paolo's latest attempt at strengthening its housing strategy. …

While housing markets play a significant role in economies, new research shows houses across 40 countries are less affordable than at any time since the 2008 financial crisis. IMF economist Deniz Igan helped develop the Housing Affordability Index. In this podcast, she says the pandemic triggered an unusual sequence of events that housing markets a…

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association's Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a specia…

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association's Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a specia…

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association's Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a specia…

With sub-Saharan Africa soon to have one of the largest working-age populations in the world, removing barriers to business growth and encouraging higher productivity industries will help provide the employment opportunities it needs. But reforms don't come easy. Wenjie Chen and Andrew Tiffin are economists in the IMF's Africa Department and produc…

As inflation and interest rates continue to decline and the likelihood of a recession slowly fades, financial markets have seen big equity gains. But the latest Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) warns of several factors that could upend the recovery, including the apparent disconnect between market buoyancy and heightened uncertainty, especi…

While 21st-century globalization and international trade dramatically changed how multinational corporations operate, the way they are taxed is largely based on early 20th-century thinking. Recent efforts by the OECD and the UN to modernize the international corporate tax system include a minimum corporate tax to make it more equitable. The IMF has…

Stories can unify or divide but our ability to imagine them is uniquely human. Cooperation and trust, built through shared stories and narratives, are the foundation of human societies and economies. So what happens when humans no longer hold the pen? Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author of several books on human evolution, inc…

With all the instability within the Middle East and North Africa region of late, Egypt has nonetheless managed to reign in soaring inflation and win its largest-ever foreign investment. Egypt's efforts to restore macroeconomic stability in recent years have led to an arrangement under the IMF's Extended Fund Facility for Egypt, which makes availabl…

Working from home was not an option for most people before March 11, 2020, when work and home life suddenly collided. The pandemic upended many aspects of doing business, but the daily commute is one routine that seems unlikely to return to what it was. Nicholas Bloom was studying the potential impact of remote work long before the pandemic launche…

The world has changed since postwar economic thought placed GDP growth as its guiding principle. 20th-century progress has pushed planetary resources to the limit and brings the sustainability of traditional macroeconomic models into question. In this podcast, Kate Raworth talks with journalist Rhoda Metcalfe about her alternative model Doughnut Ec…

For many emerging market economies, moving from an export-oriented strategy with labor-intensive manufacturing to a more sophisticated production process was key to their development. But the world is quickly changing, and Raghuram Rajan says India need not follow that same path. In their new book, Breaking the Mold, the former Reserve Bank of Indi…

For decades, governments have been tapping into global sovereign debt markets to smooth ups and downs in revenue with the hope that it would help spur investment. But what happens when government borrowing fails to deliver, and the citizens are left paying the bill? Mark Aguiar says emerging market and developing economies are especially vulnerable…

The world is changing so quickly it's hard to think of one aspect of our economic lives that hasn't shifted from what it was only a few years ago. Trade is no exception. New technologies, the re-emergence of industrial policy, and rising geopolitical tensions are all putting added pressure on the international trading system. Michele Ruta is a trad…

Aging populations in many advanced and emerging market economies mean shrinking workforces, weighing on growth. However, the opposite is true in low-income countries where populations are growing, and the expanding workforce may lack the skills for the job market. How can these two scenarios offset each other? Lisa Kolovich says women hold the key.…

Nigeria's new administration has set out on an ambitious reform path to stabilize its currency, regain market confidence, and tame inflation. In this podcast, Governor Olayemi Cardoso and IMF Africa Department head, Abebe Aemro Selassie discuss the role of Nigeria's central bank in restoring macroeconomic stability. The conversation took place as p…

Economic growth is often seen as the core ingredient to social development, but it's a relatively new idea. So what did pre-growth society look like and how much growth can modern society sustain? In his latest book, Daniel Susskind argues that economic policy should consider the costs of growth more carefully and realign the drivers to better fit …

Central banks worldwide share common practices in how they operate, but the UK's central bank is unique in how it makes its rate decisions. Catherine Mann is a Professor of the Practice at Brandeis University and one of four external voting members of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. In this podcast, Mann says the pickup in cap…

It's no mystery where the IMF was born but its origin story might surprise you. While the spotlight was on the charismatic British economist John Maynard Keynes during the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, a little-known American economist was working in the shadows. Harry Dexter White's plan would lead to the creation of the IMF and forever change th…

While African countries have little to do with what's causing the climate crisis, they are feeling the brunt of the extreme weather patterns and left footing a climate-mitigation bill they can't afford. Michael Olabisi is an assistant professor at Michigan State University and studies sustainable development in low-income countries. In this podcast…

When disaster strikes, the knee-jerk reaction is to seek public funds for support, but private donors have the agility that governments often don't. And while capital flows to Africa slowed to a trickle during the pandemic, philanthropy and remittances held steady. Una Osili is the Associate Dean for Research and International Programs at Indiana U…

Conflict disrupts lives and economies everywhere, but recent IMF analytical work suggests the economic impact of conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia has proven larger and more persistent than in other regions. In this podcast, Ghassan Salamé (SciencesPo Paris), Mark Malloch-Brown (Open Society Foundations), and Rola Dashti (UNESCWA) discus…