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 Medha Prasanna
Without intentional strategies to strengthen energy infrastructure, the Global South will remain largely a consumer of AI technologies.
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.
Increased malicious cyber activities by criminals and state actors undermine the technical security of digital systems and threaten the industrial, social, and economic systems that rely on them.
Special Report
By Abagail Lawson
Originally published in the U.N. Open-ended Working Group on ICTs “zero draft” report, March 2021.
By Abagail Lawson, Anneleen Roggeman, Michael Depp, and Bruce McConnell
Observer Research Foundation America, 1100 17th St. NW, Suite 501, Washington DC 20036 USA
