A Few White Papers
you are currently viewing::Pension Reform and Stock Market DevelopmentFebruary 28, 2025-Summary We also highlight the challenges of individual impatience, network externalities, and coordination failure in long-term equity investments, which are crucial for stock market development and technological innovation. We find that FICMI pension schemes-when sufficiently wide in coverage and large in size-can serve as coordination devices to support long-term equity investments. Such investments will not only promote domestic stock market development and make it easier for firms to raise long-term equity capital, therefore supporting long-term economic growth, but also enhance financial inclusion and enable more households to benefit from the overall economic development, therefore contributing to inclusive growth. Moreover, we find that the introduction of FICMI pension schemes can impact household savings in two ways: first, FICMI pension can increase household savings through "forced/incentivized" savings channel, where households save too little without FICMI pension (such as in many EMDEs); and second, FICMI pension can decrease household savings and increase household consumption by reducing non-pension savings and decreasing precautionary savings, where households save too much without FICMI pension (such as in China). In both cases, FICMI pension schemes can help move the economy closer to the optimal level of household savings, and may also help improve the structure of such savings. Finally, we discuss the enabling conditions (such as a strong political commitment to the reform and a well-designed fiscal strategy for financing the transition) and policy design for FICMI pension schemes. Source: imf.org |
What Drives Crypto Mining? Evidence from Hardware Imports
July 10, 2026-Summary
Understanding financial activity beyond traditional regulatory frameworks is essential for policymakers. Yet cryptocurrency mining-which offers a direct entry point into the crypto ecosystem without relying on traditional financial intermediaries-remains highly opaque.
Aggregate Gains from AI and Their Distribution: Global Evidence from Usage Data
July 10, 2026-Summary
How large are the gains from AI, and how are they distributed across occupations? Using five waves of the Anthropic Economic Index (January 2025 to February 2026), we construct two novel measures from observed AI usage across countries over the world.
Gold in Central Bank Reserves: Strategic Considerations, Market Risks, and Practical Guidance
July 9, 2026-Gold has re-emerged as a prominent component of central bank reserves, largely reflecting valuation gains from higher gold prices rather than large-scale accumulation. This Note assesses gold's role from a reserve management perspective, emphasizing that while gold carries no credit risk and may support long-term balance-sheet resilience, it is highly volatile, offers only conditional hedging and diversification benefits, and is ill-suited to the liquidity tranche of reserves.
Financial Market Infrastructures Evolution in a Tokenized Economy
July 2, 2026-Summary
This paper examines how tokenization and distributed ledger technology may transform Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs) by enabling smart contracts to perform a growing share of functions traditionally undertaken by central securities depositories, central counterparties, and trade repositories.
The Global Versus Local Identification of Macroeconomic Damages
June 30, 2026--Key takeaways:
Adrien Bilal and Diego R. Känzig's "The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global Versus Local Temperature" (QJE, 2026) challenges the conventional approach of estimating physical climate risk-induced macroeconomic damages.
The paper argues that global temperature variation may capture a broader macroeconomic climate signal than local temperature variability alone, leading to substantially higher damage estimates than those reported in much of the established literature.
Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity in the Financial Sector
June 30, 2026-Summary
Artificial intelligence is reshaping cyber risk in the financial sector by accelerating the speed, frequency, and breadth of vulnerability discovery and potential exploitation. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in financial institutions and market infrastructures, it can strengthen cyber defense but also heighten systemic risk-particularly through shared digital infrastructure, common service providers, and machine-speed attack-defense dynamics that outpace human response.
Ireland: Selected Issues
June 29, 2026-The Irish economy has remained resilient amid trade and geopolitical tensions, but its favorable outlook faces challenges and uncertainties.
World Economic Forum-Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026
June 23, 2026--The top 10 emerging technologies of 2026 are:
1. Everything-to-grid energy
Everything-to-grid energy transforms buildings, vehicles and devices from passive electricity consumers into active grid resources, storing and returning power in real-time. New battery chemistries, smarter coordination software and updated compensation models are making this possible at scale.
Low-tech Longevity Investments Could Unlock $6 Trillion by 2040
June 23, 2026-Low-tech, low-cost strategies could prevent 400 million falls at home, 8.5 million new type 2 diabetes cases and 2.4 million dementia cases by 2040, while unlocking $5.8 trillion in healthcare savings and $645 billion in productivity gains. Yet much of that opportunity remains unrealized because governments and businesses manage health, finances and labour participation separately, a new World Economic Forum report finds.
Stack battles: the US-China artificial-intelligence rivalry is moving beyond chips alone
June 22, 2026--China is challenging US leadership in both AI hardware and software, with Europe unlikely to catch up
Despite Chinese progress, the United States remains for now ahead in the race for dominance over the so-called artificial intelligence hardware stack -the resources and equipment, especially semiconductors, needed to run AI models.
