Insights

Europe faces significant challenges including industrial competition, energy insecurity, and defense pressures, which are difficult to tackle without strong coordination. Britain's Brexit experience shows the costs of leaving the EU single market and customs union, with UK exports decreasing and productivity forecasts reduced. Despite Brexit, the UK continues to face the same external pressures without the same tools for response. Shared investment and cooperation, such as in research and infrastructure, are vital for competitiveness. While non-membership arrangements exist, full EU membership offers greater market access combined with decision-making influence, strengthening the case for reconsidering Brexit with appropriate reforms.
Africa, Latin America | Financial services, Health
Europe’s vulnerabilities strengthen the case for reversing Brexit
Many workers choose freelance work seeking autonomy and freedom from long hours, but many experience intense time pressure and anxiety. Freelancers often feel compelled to stay constantly busy, blending work and leisure as they hunt for jobs or self-improve to remain employable. Busyness becomes a source of pride and status, reinforced by gamified competition on freelancing platforms. This leads to a pervasive sense of time scarcity and inability to relax. In contrast, debates about reducing work hours, such as a four-day week, aim to improve worker wellbeing and reduce stress, offering an alternative approach to reclaiming time in modern labor contexts.
Is freelance work, or the four-day week, the best way to reclaim our time?
AI agents are advancing from answering questions to autonomously researching products, making payments, and potentially handling deposits, loans, investments, and insurance. However, fully autonomous AI executing financial transactions faces significant regulatory challenges, especially in South Korea, where current laws restrict delegation of payment authority and require transactions to be conducted by account holders themselves. AI-driven advisory, comparison, and recommendation services are emerging first, as they align more easily with existing licensing and consumer protection frameworks. These services raise concerns about conflicts of interest, reliability, and regulatory compliance. Policymakers must balance fostering innovation with safeguarding consumers, as financial institutions face challenges adapting to AI while tech firms expand into finance.
Financial services
Development Asia: When AI Agents Enter Finance, Can Regulation Keep Up?
Aligning an innovation portfolio with corporate strategy requires focusing on strategic priorities rather than just project metrics. Senior leaders should begin by revisiting and agreeing on the company’s strategy, identifying vulnerabilities and opportunities that innovation can address. These strategic needs should then be translated into a limited set of clear innovation goals encompassing new technologies, markets, processes, or business models. Subsequently, the innovation portfolio must be evaluated holistically to ensure projects support these goals, eliminating redundant or non-strategic efforts. Financial metrics remain useful for screening but should not dominate decision-making, as overreliance on them risks misaligning innovation with strategy.
How to align your innovation portfolio with your strategy
Liberal democracies assumed political development was complete, expecting markets to promote freedom and technology to expand markets while governments became mainly administrative. This approach left democratic institutions unprepared for powerful companies that control public infrastructure, information, and political decision-making. The book examines this failure, identifying who now holds power and why traditional political language no longer fits the current reality.
Africa, Latin America | Health
The Tectonic Shift: Power, Tech, and the End of Nations
Surveys across 34 countries reveal that AI is generally viewed positively worldwide, especially in poorer nations like Nigeria and Vietnam, where nearly 90% believe AI will improve their lives and humanity. In South Korea, about two-thirds share this optimistic outlook. Conversely, richer Western countries such as the US, Canada, and France show more negative or mixed feelings about AI’s impact. The difference may stem from greater AI exposure and varied experiences, but overall, AI maintains broad popularity outside the West.
Africa
The surprising popularity of AI
AI is increasingly integrated into everyday work, education, and personal life, reshaping job markets and digital services with promises of growth and efficiency, often without considering social and political impacts. Despite the dominance of powerful corporations, democratic change is possible by creatively identifying and utilizing less obvious democratic levers embedded in procurement, legal frameworks, and user-driven standards. Democracy is framed as a practiced way of living rather than solely government structure. This collection explores global technological politics across five themes, offering insights and tools for organizing participatory workshops to foster "digital democracy from below."
ICT, Education
Digital Democracy from Below: Resisting AI and Techno-solutionism
Social Security faces a significant funding shortfall within the next decade, threatening substantial benefit cuts. Potential solutions include benefit reductions, tax increases, and raising the retirement age, each with economic tradeoffs. Government accounting methods may underestimate the program’s financial challenges. Policymakers must act soon to preserve Social Security’s solvency.
Social Security Is Running Out of Time
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) offers an ethical and inclusive approach to technology development that respects cultural values and context. Indigenous knowledge, rich in ethical principles and cultural insights, can address biases and gaps in mainstream AI. However, risks such as cultural appropriation, exploitation, and loss of heritage arise from commercialization and misuse. This research, using a virtue ethics framework and secondary sources, underscores the importance of culturally sensitive AI that honors Indigenous ways of knowing. Effective collaboration between Indigenous communities and AI developers is essential to create inclusive, equitable, and sustainable technological innovations.
Education
Ethical and inclusive challenges of integrating AI and indigenous knowledge systems
Climate change is increasing flood risks in the UK, leading to policy shifts encouraging communities to "live with water" and build resilience. However, many residents in flood-prone areas reject this approach, seeing it as transferring responsibility from institutions to individuals rather than providing adequate protection. Research with flood groups in north-west England reveals skepticism toward resilience measures like property-level adaptations, which are viewed as temporary fixes instead of addressing root causes. Residents demand more visible investment in flood defenses and greater government accountability. For resilience to gain public acceptance, it must be a shared responsibility involving institutional support, not a burden placed solely on communities.
Africa | Financial services
As flood risk rises, some communities question the idea of resilience
Spain's 2007 long-term care reform (SAAD) expanded access to publicly funded social care for older individuals with dependency needs, offering services like home help and cash subsidies for family caregivers. Analysis shows these social care investments improved life satisfaction, reduced loneliness and depression, and increased survival rates, often more cost-effectively than equivalent health care spending. Effects were especially strong for women, those living alone, rural residents, and the oldest participants. The benefits are linked to improved nutrition, physical strength, and reduced isolation, highlighting the value of well-funded social care in promoting well-being and longevity.
Health
Spain shows investing in social care can be better value than funding health care
Sharing data across organizations and jurisdictions generates significant economic and social value, especially as artificial intelligence advances require high-quality, domain-specific data. Data spaces enable trusted multi-party data sharing through federated governance, particularly beneficial when multiple parties with limited trust in any single intermediary aim for collective value creation and ongoing governance. However, despite substantial public investment, few data spaces have achieved operational and financial viability. Success depends on governance design, interoperability, and trust-building mechanisms, which face initial bootstrapping challenges addressed by eight policy considerations outlined in the OECD report.
Health, ICT
Data Spaces between Co‑ordination Challenges, Financial Viability and Public Policy
National Statistical Offices (NSOs) originated to support core state functions like taxation and governance but have evolved into professional entities that provide impartial statistics serving the public interest. Despite modernization efforts, NSOs now confront challenges including declining survey participation, budget constraints, political interference, and competition from private and AI-driven data sources. Sustaining public trust demands more than technological upgrades; it requires visible independence, ethical leadership, proactive engagement, and institutional courage. Drawing on international initiatives and advanced statistical systems, a comprehensive reform agenda is proposed to enhance democratic resilience amid the rise of AI-mediated information ecosystems.
Health
National statistical organizations at a crossroads: Trust, independence, and democratic relevance in the AI Era
Political campaigns have relied on social media and algorithms since at least 2008, with AI now deeply influencing elections by shaping voter habits, spreading disinformation, and fueling political apathy. Experts highlight that healthy democracies depend on mutual trust, open discourse, and respectful disagreement, supported by established processes. AI's ability to create and manipulate information rapidly undermines public trust, leading many citizens to question the authenticity of political content and disengage. This erosion of trust threatens democratic participation and the legitimacy of election outcomes.
Africa
A Semiquincentennial of Apathy … and AI
Technological sovereignty has become a prominent goal within the EU following the 2024 appointment of the Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, yet the EU lacks a clear definition of the concept. The European Commission’s recent technological sovereignty package frames it as possessing essential digital capabilities to maintain societal function while reducing strategic dependencies and external risks. While the package introduces important measures, it fails to address a critical aspect: agency—the ability to shape the desired digital future and make autonomous decisions about technology integration.
ICT
EU technological sovereignty has an unanswered question: what do we want it for?
A consensus research project by experts Panayiota Kendeou, Jeffrey A. Greene, and Nia Nixon evaluated generative AI’s impact on learning across K-20 U.S. education. The study identified 65 specific learning processes influenced by generative AI, with consensus reached on 42 regarding its potential to enhance or disrupt them. The findings offer evidence-based guidance for researchers, educators, and policymakers on the dual benefits and risks of generative AI in education, addressing gaps left by previous low-quality studies and broad risk reports.
Education
Ways generative AI can support and threaten learning in K‑20 U.S. education
China and the United States have established new empires founded on control over advanced AI technologies, including large language models, semiconductor chips, infrastructure, and capital. Their dominance extends beyond traditional realms like territory or trade routes to control knowledge itself, setting the framework for future scientific and intellectual progress worldwide. This AI-based imperial power creates global dependencies, influencing innovation, production, culture, and thought. Historical empires often decline due to resource exhaustion or inability to maintain control; similarly, the central challenge for these AI empires may be sustaining the financial and institutional capacity to lead this technology race. AI thus serves as both a tool and a contested resource in extending and exercising modern imperial power.
Education
Empires of AI: The Rise and Fall of a New Global Order
The UK government's approval of the Jackdaw North Sea gas field, despite widespread global criticism, undermines its climate credibility and international standing. The project, set to meet just 2% of UK gas demand for a decade, was re-approved following a quashed initial consent due to inadequate emissions accounting. This move contrasts with global trends toward fossil fuel phase-out and weakens the UK's position to oppose similar projects elsewhere. While the UK has historically led climate initiatives and enshrined net zero law, its support for new fossil fuel extraction risks setting a double standard. The decision comes amid growing global efforts to transition from fossil fuels, legal pressures, and the prospect of peak fossil fuel demand accelerating sooner than expected.
Jackdaw decision could haunt the UK at future climate summits
Generation Z across Europe faces overlapping crises including climate change, mental health challenges, academic and economic pressures, and housing insecurity. Adolescence, extending into the twenties, is marked by increased school demands, reduced family and peer support, intensified parental expectations, and amplified social comparison via social media. Economic concerns such as high living and education costs, and uncertain job prospects exacerbate stress. The visible climate crisis causes anxiety, compounded by a perceived lack of youth involvement in decision-making, fueling frustration and protests. Despite rising mental health issues linked to broader societal pressures, many young people remain engaged, expressing agency through activism and showing growing support for collective solutions like the EU.
Africa | Health
Youth protests across Europe: the overlapping crises facing Gen Z
About one million UK youths aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), highlighting a need for broader preparation beyond qualifications. The COVID-19 pandemic and digital reliance have reduced face-to-face interactions, limiting young people's chances to develop interpersonal and confidence-building skills essential for work and community participation. While new technical and vocational routes can provide practical qualifications, education must also intentionally cultivate communication, collaboration, and social skills. Initiatives like Wales’s curriculum emphasize developing capable, confident individuals alongside academic knowledge. Combining qualifications with opportunities to engage and relate to others better equips young people for future work and societal roles.
Africa | Education, ICT
Young people need more than qualifications to prepare them for work

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