Global Economics and Development
ORF America conducts programs and research around more effective development policies, strengthening global value chains, coordinating foreign assistance initiatives, and fostering entrepreneurship in the developing world.
Experts:
By Anit Mukherjee
As crude oil prices moderate and energy supplies become more predictable, India has an opportunity to address three key challenges.
By Ashita Jain
The proposed India-U.S. trade deal discussions are distinct from traditional FTA negotiations, for they resemble a strategic economic partnership being negotiated under tariff pressure and in pursuit of an increasingly elusive sense of predictability for Indian exporters.
By Anit Mukherjee and Caroline Arkalji
If implemented effectively, the Global Biofuels Alliance could help position biofuels not simply as a short-term response to supply disruptions, but as a more strategic pillar of long-term energy security, industrial development, and energy transitions.
By Anit Mukherjee
The current crisis in the Middle East has demonstrated that ensuring energy security will remain a challenge for policymakers in the foreseeable future, especially for countries like India. At the same time, the current disruption provides an opportunity to initiate and build on energy sector reforms to make sure that countries are better prepared to deal with such shocks in the future.
By Marta Bengoa
Using outdated balance-of-payments provisions designed for fixed exchange rates makes no sense under current monetary arrangements. Trump can continue imposing tariffs within constitutional boundaries, but the constraints now bind more tightly. Whether this leads to a more sensible trade policy or simply shifts chaos to different legal authorities remains to be seen.
By Anit Mukherjee
Lula’s state visit to India will underscore the important role of Brazil and India as leaders of the Global South helping countries navigate geopolitical uncertainty, rebalanced global trade and supply chains, rapid diffusion of transformational technologies, and accelerating impact of a changing climate. With the United States hosting the G20 this year, a strong relationship between the two countries will be critical to consolidate the achievements and keep the priorities of the Global South on the agenda.
By Udaibir Das
When finance is discussed in the context of India’s trade agreements, the debate polarizes: either India is genuinely opening, or it remains stuck in defensive regulation. But neither captures what is happening: India is selectively binding regulatory discretion, exporting specific platforms, and keeping control over balance-sheet risks.
By Anit Mukherjee with Dhruba Purkayastha, Arya Roy Bardhan, Srijan Shukla, and Jhanvi Tripathi
The “reciprocal tariffs” announced by the United States in early April disrupted the global trade flows and unsettled the multilateral system built over several decades. As a result, global players are adjusting to this new reality and altering their behavior beyond tariff measures to safeguard their own interests.
By Marta Bengoa
The India-EU free trade agreement will connect over two billion people across a market representing nearly a quarter of global GDP. But the real story isn't about size. It's about timing. After seventeen years of false starts and negotiations, both parties finally grasped what's at stake: in a world fragmenting between Washington's capricious tariffs and Beijing's economic coercion, this deal is economic insurance.
By Marta Bengoa
Speaking at Davos, Trump first ruled out using military force to acquire Greenland (after weeks of refusing to do so), then hours later announced what he called a "framework of a future deal" with NATO on Arctic security. Whether the framework leads to substantive Arctic security cooperation or remains another example of Trump declaring victory without achieving objectives, the damage to transatlantic economic relations has been done.
By Anit Mukherjee
Just as the Pittsburgh G20 Summit in 2009 shaped the global economy after the global financial crisis, next year’s Summit in Miami could reset the G20 to issues that matter: financial stability, economic security, and technological innovation.
By Marta Bengoa
Rather than reviving American manufacturing and boosting employment, the data from Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs tell a story of job losses in manufacturing, stagnant productivity in that sector, higher inflation across the economy, and economic uncertainty on a scale not seen in decades.
By Anit Mukherjee
The fact is that there have been few concrete proposals to address the twin challenges of debt sustainability and the rising demands for additional resources for sustainable development. In a world coming to terms with the radical changes in the development finance landscape over the past months, the leadership of the developing world to advance sustainable development is more critical than ever.
By Marta Bengoa
The current situation demands acknowledgment that trade and monetary policy operate as interconnected systems, not isolated levers that can be pulled independently. A coherent approach would acknowledge that the United States’ economic strength derives from its integration into global supply chains, not isolation from them.
By Anit Mukherjee
In less than two months, global heads of governments will land in Belém for the formal opening of COP30. But with little time left, climate commitments are falling short of the urgency needed to address the crisis.
By Anit Mukherjee
India’s tariff troubles in the short term are an opportunity to undertake a strategic revaluation of its export strategy at a time when the global trading system itself is in turmoil.
By Anit Mukherjee and Caroline Arkalji
The consecutive presidencies of Indonesia, India, Brazil, and South Africa within the G20 offers a blueprint for how the Global South can continue shaping global governance at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and a rapid rebalancing of the globalization process itself.
By Marta Bengoa
What began as April's "Liberation Day" announcement has evolved into a complex framework of negotiated settlements that, while avoiding the most severe outcomes initially threatened, creates new economic distortions across multiple trading relationships.
By Anit Mukherjee
The BRICS Leader’s Declaration lays out in detail the process for a revision of quotas at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, representation of the Global South in the governance of artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies that will shape the future, and increasing the accessibility and affordability of climate finance.
By Anit Mukherjee and Caroline Arkalji
In the run up to the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, countries are reevaluating the role of biofuels in supporting efforts to accelerate the clean energy transition, particularly in the transportation sector, which accounts for nearly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
By Marta Bengoa
What emerges from the London talks is not a coherent policy framework but rather a series of tactical compromises that fail to address underlying strategic challenges.
By Caroline Arkalji
While India is globally recognized for its highly skilled engineering talent, it lags behind its peers in terms of a large, technically trained labor force needed to attract manufacturing investment at scale. To compete, India must align its technical education more closely with industry needs and emphasize skills critical to modern manufacturing.
By Udaibir Das
Amid rising financial instability, slowing growth, trade wars, and persistent inequality, the Global South faces growing vulnerabilities yet remains pivotal to the world economy’s future.
By Udaibir Das
Whether governments seek to phase out energy subsidies, reform pensions, or expand tax bases, success now hinges on how well reforms are explained, sequenced, and backed by credible commitments.
By Anit Mukherjee
How will policymakers rebalance their economies where the three pillars of globalization — free trade, free markets, and free movement of capital — have been affected almost at the same time and what does this mean for the Global South?
By Marta Bengoa
As the global trade conflict intensifies, we must consider not just the direct costs of tariffs but also their profound secondary effects on America's long-term fiscal sustainability.
By Marta Bengoa
The most problematic aspect of the newly announced Trump tariffs may be the deliberate ambiguity around how countries might negotiate lower rates.
By Marta Bengoa
The fundamental contradiction in the Trump administration’s approach to trade policy remains unresolved: a strong economy cannot be built on weak economic thinking. Tariffs are not a strategy; they are a symptom of strategic absence.
By Caroline Arkalji
Policymakers in remittance-dependent nations must consider the broader, long-term effects of U.S. immigration and taxation policies.
By Udaibir Das
By deepening financial resilience, accelerating capital market reforms, and fostering global financial integration, India can reinforce its position as a stable, competitive, and inclusive financial powerhouse—one that is fully aligned with its long-term economic ambitions.
By Udaibir Das
Technology changes the form of money. The institution behind the promise still sets its quality.
By Udaibir Das
Two decades of relief and reform treated debt management as a capacity problem. In a low-income country, it is statecraft; the office must stand as an institution of the state, mandated, autonomous and accountable. Reforming it and holding the sovereign and parliament accountable for outcomes means the debt cycle finally has a circuit breaker.
By Udaibir Das
If the governor is the last port of call, choosing one is not a staffing decision. The question is no longer who is senior or who is loyal, but who can fight a fire, who can say no and whose word the market will trust at three in the morning. Independence can be hollowed without being repealed. The clause reads perfectly while the substance is gone.
By Udaibir Das
Drawing on the public sector balance sheet literature, the economics of sovereign self-insurance, and the Knightian distinction between risk and uncertainty, this paper argues that conventional sovereign asset-liability management is necessary but incomplete.
By Udaibir Das
More moves of this kind should be expected, extending beyond energy into critical minerals, technology standards, industrial policy, and cross-border finance. The UAE’s decision is not an outlier. It is a marker — not of fragmentation, but of redefinition.
By Udaibir Das
Fiscal space, financial space and institutional credibility are no longer separable policy domains. They are jointly binding constraints. The IMF flagships document their components but not the mechanism.
By Udaibir Das
Under conditions of armed conflict and state rupture, banking shifts away from decentralized intermediation towards directed, survival-orientated finance. Yet the policy conversation has concentrated on sanctions, commodities and trade — the institutional reorganization of banking under conflict remains less well examined.
By Udaibir Das
Adopted by the National People’s Congress in March 2026, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan does not treat finance as a supporting function for economic growth. It treats finance as a strategic instrument of technological capability.
By Udaibir Das
Africa’s debt story is usually told as a liability problem: too much debt, the wrong currency, the wrong creditor, the wrong maturity. Those issues matter. But long-run sustainability is a balance-sheet question: is borrowing being converted into assets that raise the repayment base?
By Udaibir Das
Africa’s debt story is not about waiting for easier global money. It is about whether domestic financial systems can absorb sovereign risk without amplifying internal fragility – and whether policy space purchased at 10% to 13% builds assets that justify the cost.
By Udaibir Das
The current metrics of India–Africa economic diplomacy focused on mobilization volume, systematically fail along the diplomatic-financial chain. An integrated balance-sheet framework could realign these incentives through institutional capacity thresholds, end-use governance, and countercyclical safeguards, transforming diplomatic finance from a source of vulnerability into genuine development capital.
By Udaibir Das
For the first time in years, the Budget addresses not just who issues debt but also whether it actually trades afterwards. A new market-making framework for corporate bonds, accompanied by instruments that let investors take positions on bond performance without holding the bonds, marks a departure from India's longstanding focus on issuance while ignoring liquidity.
By Udaibir Das
Global financial institutions continue to frame the 2026 outlook for emerging markets through a familiar cyclical lens. The consensus assumes U.S. monetary easing, a softer dollar and a modest global slowdown will favor local-currency assets, credible disinflation paths and balance-sheet repair. This narrative is historically grounded and internally coherent. It is also increasingly insufficient.
By Brian Webster, Alan Gelb, and Anit Mukherjee
Shifting the payment of social transfers from cash to direct deposit via bank or mobile money accounts can directly improve efficiency for governments and convenience for beneficiaries. It may also produce positive spillovers such as boosting financial inclusion and empowering women. But do these spillovers materialize, and under what circumstances?
By Udaibir Das
The Trevor Manuel G20 Africa Expert Panel Report reframes Africa’s constraints as a single system of mispricing, debt compression and governance asymmetry. Its proposals for refinancing, collective bargaining and International Monetary Fund quota reform mark the first coordinated attempt to shift power within the international financial architecture.
By Udaibir Das
Ubuntu economics does not invoke moral claims. It advances a structural argument: Africa’s demographic momentum, mineral endowments and ecological assets are central to global prosperity, and instability in the region imposes system-wide costs. The reform frameworks are now primarily in place. The question is whether the political and institutional conditions of 2026 permit their implementation.
By Udaibir Das
While stability prevails in institutional titles, resilience prevails in policy content. This shift influences the oversight and allocation of approximately $470tn in global financial assets. This has structural implications and affects public accountability.
By Udaibir Das
What began as a spread on a bond has become a spread across the sovereign balance sheet. The 2025 annual meetings have made clear that incremental adjustments will not suffice. Until new institutions and norms emerge, sovereigns will continue to pay in basis points and in ownership and discover that what the premium buys is not sovereignty, but postponement.
By Udaibir Das
In a climate emergency, redundancy might be precisely what resilience requires. The sovereignty premium is that insurance price. Whether it’s worth paying depends on how much autonomy matters versus efficiency – and whether choice exists at all.
By Anit Mukherjee
With only two months left for the start of the leaders’ summit in Belém, the future of climate action seems to be based more on hope than conviction. A positive outcome from COP30 will require stronger commitment from the global community than what we have seen until now.
By Udaibir Das
Financial surveillance fails when it matters most. Every major financial disruption – from the 1997 Asian crisis to the 2008 financial crisis or recent geopolitical shocks from wars, sanctions and trade realignments – has exposed how blind spots persist in national systems, regional arrangements and global oversight.
By Karan Bhasin
A lesser-known reality of the GST is that it has a total of eight tax slabs, excluding the exemptions. These start at 0.25 and go all the way up to 28 per cent.
By Udaibir Das
In dynamic-system terms, the global economy has shifted from a high-integration equilibrium towards a more fragmented state, but the transition path is still in motion. For financial institutions, the challenge is calibrating marginal gain in resilience against the marginal erosion of competitive advantage.
By Anit Mukherjee
The Indo-Pacific’s future will be shaped by secure, interoperable digital systems that advance public service delivery, expand financial inclusion, and foster cross-border collaboration.
By Udaibir Das
While financial institutions promote debt swaps as ‘win-win’ solutions that address both debt distress and development financing, borrowing countries report a systematic failure in achieving both objectives, revealing an inversion of development finance principles.
By Udaibir Das
If climate finance is to support transitions that are durable and inclusive, it must evolve to accommodate precisely these kinds of interventions: institutionally grounded, locally designed and systemically significant.
By Anit Mukherjee
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a key enabler of economic and social transformation, the BRICS grouping — comprising both emerging and influential economies — has a unique opportunity to shape the trajectory of AI development through a Global South lens.
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