White Papers
Prospects Group Global Monthly-May 2026
May 29, 2026--Overview
Global manufacturing activity gained some momentum in April and May, supported partly by stockpiling, but services activity remained subdued.
The conflict in the Middle East has increased transport costs and delivery times, with supply chain pressures in April reaching their highest levels since the COVID-19 period.
Inflationary pressures are becoming more evident, with input costs and output prices rising across advanced economies and EMDEs, driven by higher shipping, energy, and other commodity costs.
Special Focus: The Effects of Geopolitical Oil Supply Shocks
Over the past four decades, the volatility of oil prices during periods of rising geopolitical risk was nearly twice that during periods when perceptions of geopolitical risk were stable.
Geopolitical oil supply shocks increase oil prices by about twice as much as estimates covering all types of oil supply shocks. Geopolitical oil shocks also exhibit strong spillovers to other commodity prices.
Oil inventories, after an initial drop, typically surpass their pre-shock level in the medium-term after a geopolitical oil supply shock-a notable difference compared with other types of supply shocks.
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Source: worldbank.org
The Women's Health Innovation Radar: Revealing Gaps and Opportunities Across the Science-to-Patient Journey
May 18, 2026-Advancing women's health requires not only scientific progress but an innovation ecosystem capable of translating discovery into evidence, technologies and scalable solutions that improve outcomes for women globally. Yet, despite growing attention, the landscape remains fragmented, and many high-impact conditions continue to receive insufficient targeted innovation.
The Women's Health Innovation Radar insight report provides a comprehensive view of innovation across the full science-to-patient journey.
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Source: WEF (World Economic Forum)
Paris Report 4: The New Global Imbalances
April 13, 2026--Global imbalances are back in focus. Central banks, international organizations, the G7 and the G20 are debating their causes and remedies. This Paris Report 4-a joint CEPR-Bruegel initiative-aims to provide independent analytical foundations for the debate, particularly for the French G7 presidency. It brings together 17 contributions on global imbalances over the past century, their current configuration among key players (the United States, Europe, and China), and perspectives from lower-income countries.
The first-best solution is well known: coordinated adjustment among major economies. The United States would raise national saving through fiscal consolidation; China would rebalance toward consumption; and Europe would increase investment. This policy mix would reduce current account imbalances at their source and lower the risk of destabilising spillovers. But such coordination is unlikely. The relevant question is how the global economy adjusts in its absence - and what this implies for the rest of the world.
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Source: Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
IMF Working Paper-Trade Policy Shocks and Corporate Valuations-Disentangling Trade and Uncertainty Channels
April 10, 2026-Summary
This paper investigates how the 2025 U.S. trade-policy shocks propagated to global equity valuations. Country-level studies have documented the aggregate costs of tariffs and uncertainty- but firm-level evidence on their joint role after the 2025 shocks remains limited. Filling this gap- we use a firm-level event-study design to disentangle a trade-exposure channel from a sensitivity-to-uncertainty channel.
Firms with greater U.S. trade exposure and higher uncertainty sensitivity experienced the sharpest valuation declines following the initial tariff announcement on April 2- but also the strongest rebounds after the announced pause and subsequent trade agreements.
Both channels are economically meaningful and of similar magnitude- and jointly account for a substantial share of the market response. Together- they represent about 20 percent of the stock-price decline among tradable firms after April 2 and about 10 percent of the rebound after trade agreements. Overall- the findings show that trade policy affects firms not only through expected tariff costs- but also by reshaping policy predictability in ways that affect firms' investment incentives.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Making Stablecoins Stable
April 10, 2026-Summary
Payment stablecoins are privately issued digital money with the potential to enhance payment efficiency- foster innovation- and improve financial inclusion. At the same time- they are vulnerable to runs and associated welfare losses. One way to lower run risk is to require stablecoin issuers to hold safe assets. But doing so may lower issuers' profitability and thus their incentive to provide stablecoins- hampering payment innovation and product variety.
This paper offers a theoretical framework to navigate the tradeoff between maintaining stability and incentivizing issuance.
Based on the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model of bank runs- the paper shows that an unregulated private equilibrium is suboptimal. Stablecoin issuers hold risky assets to maximize profits- increasing run risk. A social planner can improve the equilibrium by requiring the backing of stablecoins with a safe asset (such as central bank reserves in a narrow bank setting)- and creating conditions for other sources of revenue for issuers (such as central bank reserves remuneration or policies for payment data utilization). The model offers a baseline for the ongoing policy discussion while identifying considerations for further study.
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Source: imf.org
IMF-Understanding Global Imbalances
April 6, 2026-Summary
Against the backdrop of persistent and recently widening global imbalances, the paper presents a structured framework for understanding how domestic policies can influence current account positions by altering domestic saving and investment decisions. Staff analysis finds that traditional macroeconomic policies remain the dominant drivers of imbalances, but certain types of industrial policies could also play a role.
Micro industrial policies-those targeting specific sectors or firms-generally have ambiguous and limited effects on the current account depending on their impact on aggregate productivity. Macro industrial policies-those deployed economy-wide and often paired with restrictions such as capital flow management measures-can materially affect the current account but come at a cost to consumption. Trade restrictions, often deployed to counter imbalances, would only meaningfully alter current account balances when used temporarily or to support higher public savings.
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Source: imf.org
50 Investible Opportunities for a New Nature Economy
March 17, 2026-While businesses are feeling the adverse impacts of nature loss, they are also beginning to recognise the opportunities a nature-positive economy can offer. From precision agriculture to battery recycling to bio-based materials, new ways of doing business are delivering both long-term resilience and short-term gains.
Financial institutions are also realising the green economy can compete on returns.
This report highlights 50+ investible opportunities already generating cost-savings or revenues for businesses across the real economy.
Corporate and finance leaders are transforming their operations because it makes good business sense to do so. In 2024, the green economy accounted for ˜$8 trillion in listed equity market value and has outperformed global equities by ˜59% since 2008. Yet the private sector still invests ˜$5 trillion annually in activities that harm nature, despite research showing more than half global GDP depends on the services nature provides.
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Source: World Economic Forum (WEF)
IMF Working Paper-Stablecoin Shocks
March 6, 2026-Summary
We develop novel measures of stablecoin shocks and use them to identify the causal effects of stablecoin adoption on U.S. financial markets. Combining a daily narrative dataset of stablecoin-specific news with changes in the combined market capitalization of USDC and USDT, we measure high-frequency movements in stablecoin market capitalization and implement heteroskedasticity-based identification within an event-study and SVAR-IV framework.
Stablecoin demand shocks have triggered persistent declines in short-term Treasury yields, a depreciation of the U.S. dollar, and gradual spillovers into crypto and equity markets. We also document heterogeneous effects across firms: payment providers benefit from greater stablecoin adoption, whereas banks-including community and small banks-show no evidence of priced disintermediation risk. Our findings highlight stablecoin demand as a novel channel of asset-market transmission.
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Source: imf.org
OECD-Financial Protection Against Catastrophic Risks
March 5, 2026-Floods, Fires and Other Major Risks
Introduction
Natural hazards, cyber attacks and infectious disease outbreaks can lead to devastating financial consequences that many individuals, households or businesses would struggle to absorb. Insurance can provide a critical source of funding to absorb losses and support recovery.
However, evolving weather and environmental risks, fast-moving technological changes and other factors are testing the ability of private insurance markets to achieve broad financial protection against these risks.
This report aims to help governments strengthen financial resilience against catastrophic risks. It provides a framework to assess the need for government-supported financial protection and examines approaches to supporting insurance coverage for wildfires and floods in particular-as two important and growing risks in many countries.
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Source: OECD
IMF Working Paper-Population Aging and Pension Reforms in China
February 20, 2026--China is experiencing rapid population aging and a declining workforce, posing significant economic and fiscal challenges, especially to the pension system. This paper examines the evolution of China's pension system, assesses its gaps relative to international peers, and evaluates the macro-fiscal implications of population aging and various pension reforms.
Using a calibrated overlapping generations model that explicitly incorporates the rural-urban disparities, we project that population aging alone can slow annual GDP growth by about 2 percentage points between 2024 and 2050, while pension spending can rise by nearly 10 percentage points of GDP. The 2024 retirement age reform eases some of the long-term growth and fiscal sustainability pressures, raising GDP growth by 0.2 percentage points annually and reducing pension spending from 15.3 percent to 11.9 percent of GDP by 2050. We also use the model to examine a set of policy-relevant reforms-doubling Residents Pension Scheme benefits which are currently inadequate, linking benefits to life expectancy, further increasing the retirement age, and promoting urbanization-and find significant effects on fiscal and macroeconomic outcomes.
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Source: imf.org
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