Your World

We and our economies are completely reliant on the environment. Without the resources it provides, and the indirect services it provides through its ecosystems — purifying water, managing flood risks, recycling nutrients — we couldn’t survive. But it’s not just ours. Not only do other living beings rely on it, but future generations will too — so when we’re thinking about how our economies should work, we have a responsibility to keep them in mind.

People, companies, and stuff zoom around the world day by day, moving from one economy to the next and leaving their footprints in all of them. This can make things faster, cheaper, and available all year round. What’s not to love? Well, some would say quite a lot. Free trade, immigration and foreign investment all prompt big political debates, with both sides invoking economics to make their points. In the end, whether the world continues to become more globalized will probably depend on us finding a way to make sure the global economy functions in everybody’s favor.

The world is a very unequal and diverse place. Some countries have lots of wealth and huge economies while many people across the world live in poor and exploited conditions. International Development is the side of economics that looks at where this global poverty and inequality comes from, and tries to understand how best to tackle it.

The UN, the WTO, the IMF, the WB… endless acronyms seem to govern global economics, but the difference between what each of them actually does can get pretty confusing. International organizations uphold international agreements and support programs intended to help the global economy. But power imbalances exist within these organizations, and they’re sometimes accused of important biases.