Insights

The WTO faces challenges in sustaining a rules-based international trading system amid rising geopolitical tensions and diverse development levels among its near-universal membership. Key difficulties include managing special and differential treatment (S&DT) policies for developing versus emerging economies, with China’s recent decision to forgo S&DT easing some tensions. Reform efforts at the 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14) in 2026 aim to balance developed countries’ interests in new digital and environmental trade rules with developing countries’ priorities like agriculture. Plurilateral negotiations offer a pragmatic path forward, allowing subsets of members to advance trade rules, but consensus decision-making remains a barrier to deeper reforms. MC14 seeks ministerial commitment to continue incremental change supporting an open, rules-based order.
Taiwan, China | Financial services
Can the WTO’s ministerial meeting rescue a rules-based international order?
Hospital infrastructure must be fundamentally rethought to align with modern public health needs like aging populations, chronic diseases, and digital healthcare. Many existing hospitals are outdated, energy-inefficient, and poorly integrated with health systems, leading to inefficiencies and high operational costs that strain public budgets, especially in developing countries. Private hospitals often replicate these outdated models, resulting in fragmented healthcare delivery. Climate risks and inadequate digital integration further compromise hospital effectiveness. Effective hospital planning requires integration into national health strategies, emphasizing energy efficiency, climate resilience, digital connectivity from inception, and adaptable designs. Coordinated public-private networks and long-term cost considerations are essential for building efficient, flexible, and sustainable hospital assets that meet evolving healthcare demands.
Financial services, Education, Health
Hospital Infrastructure Rethink Is Needed to Turn Isolated Projects Into Strategic Health System Assets
Iranian missile and drone strikes severely damaged Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, responsible for about 17% of its LNG infrastructure and supplying 20% of global demand. The complex, built over decades at a cost of tens of billions, requires slow and costly repair processes due to the extreme temperatures and specialized equipment needed to handle liquefied methane. The crippled facility may force QatarEnergy to declare force majeure on long-term contracts, impacting LNG supplies to Asia and Europe for up to five years. This structural setback is expected to sustain higher global gas prices, pushing some affected nations to revert to coal as a cheaper energy source.
Why the damage to Qatar’s gas infrastructure could push costs higher for years to come
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly integrated into everyday workflows, assisting with tasks from drafting emails to influencing high-stakes decisions. However, their linguistic fluency often masks a lack of true understanding or reliability. For example, despite correctly spelling "strawberry," many models incorrectly count its letters and confidently provide faulty explanations without recognizing inconsistencies. This reveals a fundamental architectural limitation: LLMs generate plausible outputs based on pattern prediction rather than maintaining an internal model of truth or consistency. Such silent failures in simple tasks highlight significant risks in AI-assisted decision-making, especially where accuracy is critical.
When AI sounds right but is wrong – what “strawberry” reveals about the limits of today’s AI
The US-Israel war on Iran has caused significant increases in global energy and gas prices, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on energy infrastructure threatening long-term harm to the region’s energy sector and economy. This conflict disrupts energy supplies, trade flows, and drives inflation, contributing to economic fragmentation and geopolitical instability. Gulf economies face mounting challenges but are exploring resilience strategies, policy responses, and recovery paths amid rising volatility in global markets.
How is the US-Israel war on Iran impacting energy and the global economy?
Workplace wellbeing apps increasingly analyze users’ voice, typing, and digital behavior to detect signs of psychological distress using AI trained on behavioral patterns. While promising early intervention, these tools often lack transparency and can misinterpret normal variations in behavior, risking false positives and misjudgments. Mental health assessments traditionally rely on context-rich human interactions, but automated systems infer emotional states from indirect data, raising concerns about privacy, surveillance, and potential misuse in workplaces or universities. Careful use by professionals may aid early detection, but organizations must inform users about such monitoring, data use, and system validation to ensure ethical application.
Your voice, your typing, your sleep – what workplace wellbeing apps are really analysing
Deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related diseases—are notably higher in former coal mining communities in England and Wales. Despite adjusting for poverty, these areas experience significantly elevated rates of alcohol-related and drug poisoning deaths, with suicide rates also increased, especially where mines closed more recently. This suggests factors beyond economic deprivation, such as loss of stable employment and weakened social institutions after coal industry decline, contribute to lasting public health challenges. The research underscores how industrial decline has enduring effects on communities and highlights the need for careful management of economic transitions to prevent similar health inequalities.
Why ‘deaths of despair’ are higher in former coal mining communities
Iran developed a "forward defence" strategy aimed at confronting threats beyond its borders by cultivating a network of non-state actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas. This approach, rooted in historical geopolitical vulnerabilities and strategic loneliness, allowed Tehran to project influence and deter adversaries regionally without direct conflict on its soil. Originating before the 1979 revolution and expanded after the Iran-Iraq War and 2003 US invasion of Iraq, forward defence involved alliances across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, incorporating missile and asymmetric warfare capabilities. However, recent developments—including the Gaza War, weakening of allied groups, and US-Israel strikes—have exposed the strategy’s limitations and risks of direct confrontation.
The rise and fall of Iran’s forward defence strategy
Healthcare systems currently face fragmentation and inequity, limiting AI's ability to deliver personalized, inclusive care. Traditional AI integration pathways often lack contextual sensitivity and perpetuate disparities. A proposed fourth pathway, Adaptive Machine Learning (AML), continuously updates AI models using real-world, population-level data within learning health systems. AML enhances personalization, equity, quality, and system resilience through integrative data governance, adaptive study designs, and regulatory evidence sandboxes. Advancing AML requires developing prioritized clinical use cases, adaptive evaluation frameworks that address diverse populations, and regulatory environments fostering transparent, collaborative innovation for responsible, patient-centered AI in healthcare.
Education, Health
Advancing Patient-Centred AI with Adaptive Machine Learning
The aerospace and defense industry faces unprecedented demand, driving supply chain resilience needs amid bottlenecks in critical components. Tariffs, defense reforms, and geopolitical tensions add complexity, while AI tools offer solutions across design, production, and sustainment. Program execution requires stable funding and new contract models, with delivery delays impacting commercial profitability. Competition for resources intensifies from power and data center growth. Key players like engine makers and maintenance shops control capacity. Production agility and quality are crucial as the $2 trillion order backlog grows, with the space economy forecasted at $270 billion by 2030 and a projected 400-jet commercial widebody gap.
2026 Aerospace & Defense Outlook
India's subsidies and transfers, including those for food, fertilizer, and electricity, increased significantly following the COVID-19 pandemic. The study analyzes the composition and fiscal impact of these subsidies from both central and state governments. It recommends improving efficiency and targeting through measures such as rationalizing subsidies, implementing targeted schemes, and developing an integrated social security system for informal workers to ensure that support reaches those who need it most.
India | Financial services
A Study of Subsidies and Transfers in India
CARTIF is a modular trade and investment facilitation agreement launched by CAREC countries to enhance regional economic integration. It consists of a Framework Agreement, Initial Protocols covering priority cooperation areas (e.g., trade facilitation, sanitary measures, digital trade, investment facilitation), and Additional Protocols for optional deeper commitments (e.g., tariffs, intellectual property, competition). The agreement combines WTO-plus and WTO-extra provisions, allowing flexibility, voluntary participation, and differential treatment to accommodate different development levels. Its institutional structure includes a Ministerial Council and a Senior Officials Council for governance, implementation, and dispute resolution. CARTIF aims to support CAREC countries' multilateral obligations while fostering regional cooperation in emerging trade areas.
CARTIF: Key Features and Considerations for Negotiations
The Pearl City Resettlement Program (2021–2025) relocated 120 low-income, non-titleholder families living dangerously close to the Kelani Valley railway in Sri Lanka. Facing hazards from daily train exposure, flooding, and unsafe conditions, residents were moved into a 12-story, 120-unit inclusive condominium designed for accessibility, energy efficiency, and dignity. The program employed transparent, multi-agency entitlement verification, grievance redress mechanisms, and fair unit allocation via public raffle prioritizing vulnerable households. Supported by the Asian Development Bank and Sri Lankan authorities, this was the country's first fully safeguard-compliant, domestically financed urban resettlement effort, enhancing safety, tenure security, and community trust along a vital transport corridor.
From Hazard to Home: Relocating At-Risk Families to Pearl City
In coastal Bangladesh, rising salinity threatens traditional farming, impacting rural women's livelihoods. BRAC introduced a local waste management initiative integrated into climate adaptation clinics, empowering women through segregated waste collection—organic waste turns into compost to restore soil, while inorganic waste is recycled for income. Villages manage waste operations via committees led by women and youth, fostering cleaner environments and new economic opportunities. The program enhances women's leadership, financial skills, and market access, aiming to link them with microfinance. Challenges include overcoming social norms, expanding financial access, market linkages, and supportive policies to scale impact.
Bangladesh
Turning Waste Into Wealth for Women in Coastal Bangladesh
Public participation events function as scaffoldings that provide temporal structures for citizens, encouraging specific modes of engagement within participatory spaces. The 2022–2023 citizens’ climate assembly in Aarhus, Denmark, serves as a case study demonstrating this concept. The assembly’s design incorporated the Observation, Assessment, and Recommendation (OVA) method, which guided interaction and shaped epistemic hierarchies among members. Additionally, the assembly's purpose in citizen decision-making was communicated in ways that generated uncertainties in process design and facilitation. Treating participatory events as both structured and structuring allows for a deeper understanding of their practical dynamics beyond idealized evaluations.
From structure to substance: public participation as a scaffolding technology in citizen assemblies
Artificial Intelligence and Social Research explores the integration of AI into social sciences, examining it as an object, tool, context, and partner in research. The volume moves beyond simple narratives of automation, addressing how AI reshapes inquiry, interpretation, and representation while raising methodological and ethical questions. It covers topics from AI-assisted qualitative analysis and ethnography to bias and futures thinking, highlighting the co-production between technological systems and social knowledge. The book offers conceptual tools, empirical cases, and reflections to help scholars critically engage with AI as an active participant in contemporary social understanding.
Education
Artificial Intelligence and Social Research. Methods, Contexts, Imaginaries
Europe’s rich creative heritage faces threats as AI giants from the US and China train models on vast amounts of content, including European works, under lax copyright rules. European AI developers operate amid fragmented, inconsistent copyright laws, creating legal uncertainty and competitive disadvantages. The current opt-out system fails to protect rights holders effectively, leaving their livelihoods at risk without clear safeguards. To address this, a revenue-based levy on AI companies using publicly available online content in Europe is proposed, aiming to balance protection for creators with sustainable AI development.
Africa | Education
AI companies should pay a content levy in Europe
Since the emergence of generative AI in late 2022, its benefits have enhanced government efficiency and communication, but significant hazards have also appeared. AI systems have produced hallucinations—fabricated or incorrect information—leading to costly errors for governments and vendors. Examples include fictitious legal precedents and flawed chatbot advice, such as the criticized New York City business chatbot. Companies like Deloitte faced consequences for AI-generated inaccuracies. Experts stress the need for strategies to manage AI risks, emphasizing human oversight and caution, as full trust in AI remains premature.
AI Hazards and Guard Rails
The book edited by Crystal Chokshi and Robin Mansell critiques the misleading metaphors used by Big Tech to portray digital technologies as harmless and positive. It presents alternative names for these technologies that highlight their social and political harms, aiming to challenge and resist Silicon Valley’s branding and influence. Each chapter focuses on a specific technology, revealing its underlying consequences and promoting a vocabulary committed to social justice.
ICT
The Need to Rename Tech
Measuring digital transformation is essential for evidence-based policy but is complex due to digital technologies' pervasive nature, making the concept of a separate "digital economy" outdated. Key challenges include improving international comparability of indicators, adapting statistical systems to fast-evolving digital concepts, and developing interdisciplinary data collection approaches. The OECD Going Digital Measurement Roadmap 2026 promotes coordinated international efforts through ten actions to enhance countries' capacity to monitor digital transformation, address digital divides, and build new data infrastructures that track digital activities and flows in real time.
Barbados, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Chad, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Germany, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Luxembourg, Mali, New Zealand, Paraguay, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, Serbia, Singapore, United Kingdom | Financial services, ICT, Education
The OECD Going Digital Measurement Roadmap 2026

Forum Spaces

© 2026 All rights reserved
Privacy Policy & Terms of Service