White Papers
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.
We propose a novel measurement approach using detailed customs data that tracks exports of crypto mining hardware from the world's dominant producers. This trade-based proxy allows us to analyze the global distribution of mining hardware imports and identify their key drivers, guided by a stylized model. Empirically, mining surges respond strongly to global factors such as cryptocurrency prices and hardware costs, while domestic factors-including electricity prices and ambient temperature-shape the cross-country distribution of activity. Our findings highlight how global crypto markets, natural endowments, and policy choices jointly influence mining incentives, offering valuable insights for policymakers concerned with financial stability risks and energy subsidy misuse.
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Source: imf.org
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.
The AI concentration index (ACI) shows that in developing economies, virtually all AI gains accrue to a small professional enclave (ACI near 1.0); high-income economies average 0.4 to 0.5, with concentration declining in many countries. The labor cost equivalent (LCE) estimates AI’s aggregate value at $2.7 trillion annually (3.4% of GDP), an indicative measure of the labor cost of time saved by AI. Income and regulatory readiness predict concentration; lacking an official English language slows broadening, a barrier for developing countries.
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Source: imf.org
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.
The analysis recommends applying explicit market-risk haircuts when assessing gold's effective liquidity and avoiding interpretations of valuation gains as durable improvements in reserve adequacy.
It also cautions that domestic gold purchase programs-especially those involving non-monetary gold-can create mandate, governance, balance-sheet, financial integrity, operational, and monetary policy risks. Central banks should treat gold as a high-risk reserve asset and anchor gold accumulation decisions in strategic asset allocation and sound policy analysis.
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Source: imf.org
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.
It argues that while record-keeping, settlement, collateral management, and reporting can increasingly be executed on-chain, key functions requiring legal certainty, governance, accountability, and discretion remain institutional in nature. The analysis assesses which activities across issuance, clearing, settlement, and reporting can migrate to code, where limitations persist, and how risks evolve in tokenized environments. It finds that tokenization is more likely to reconfigure than eliminate FMIs, creating new efficiencies while introducing novel operational and governance risks. The most plausible outcome is a hybrid FMI model in which technology and institutions jointly provide the trust, resilience, and oversight required for financial stability.
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Source: imf.org
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.
The EDHEC Climate Institute (ECI) acknowledges the paper's contribution to the field at large. It nevertheless reaffirms the unique strengths of granular approaches, particularly their ability to capture spatial heterogeneity and decompose aggregate effects.
Its value lies in testing whether standard local-temperature approaches may understate aggregate damages by missing common shocks or supply chain-propagated effects.
Its limitation lies in the loss of heterogeneity information, diluted within an aggregate effect, that scenario users increasingly require.
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Source: Edhec Business School
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.
This note argues that the main financial stability concern lies less in new types of cyberattacks than in the scale effects AI can unleash across common technologies, amplifying how quickly and widely risks spread. Strong governance and technical controls that limit the "blast radius" of breaches-that is, the scope of damage they can cause-and effectively contain their spread, robust response and recovery capacity, and stronger international coordination will be essential to safeguard financial stability.
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Source: imf.org
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.
Ireland's reliance on investment and tax revenues from multinational enterprises makes it vulnerable in an increasingly shock-prone and fragmented world, while aging, energy security, and technological transformations present additional challenges.
While the war in the Middle East demands near-term policy attention, the current strong economic position provides a window to future-proof the economy.
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Source: imf.org
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.
The central challenge is whether these distributed assets develop into a shared resilience system or remain fragmented across competing interests.
2. Direct lithium extraction Direct lithium extraction processes brine directly to recover lithium in hours rather than months, without the land and water demands of conventional evaporation ponds. Early industrial operations in Argentina and California are proving the technology works at scale and in challenging environments. The key strategic question is whether new integrated extraction and refining hubs emerge in geographies previously excluded from the lithium supply chain.
3. Passive radiative cooling materials Passive radiative cooling materials emit heat through the atmospheric window into space, allowing surfaces to cool below ambient temperature without consuming any electricity. Embedded into paints, films, roof tiles and fabrics, they are already being written into building codes in California and China. Wider adoption depends on standardised testing, integration into green building rating systems and sustained regulatory momentum in high-heat regions.
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Source: weforum.org
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.
The Longevity Dividend: The Business Case for Linking Health and Wealth, developed with Marsh, analysed prevention strategies in 21 countries to show how three low-cost measures – access to hearing aids, simple home safety improvements and physical activity programmes – could unlock massive savings by 2040.
Hidden economic costs
Poor health strains healthcare systems and personal finances, impacting financial resilience and creating wider economic costs. Women who spend just one year caregiving, for instance, face a 24% reduction in retirement savings due to time away from the workforce combined with the gender pay gap. Yet institutions often address these challenges separately, despite their growing economic consequences.
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Source: World Economic Forum
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.
Yet the early evidence suggests that the software gap, like the hardware gap, is no longer fixed or unbridgeable. The signs of Chinese catch-up are real: an open-sourced toolkit with a state-backed contributor pipeline, falling switching costs through PyTorch compatibility, flagship open-weight models running on Ascend and a protected domestic market large enough to sustain the ecosystem through its immature phase. None of these existed in meaningful form two years ago.
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Source: bruegel.org
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