A Few White Papers
you are currently viewing::Prospects Group Global Monthly-May 2026May 29, 2026--Overview
Inflationary pressures are becoming more evident, with input costs and output prices rising across advanced economies and EMDEs, driven by higher shipping, energy, and other commodity costs. Special Focus: The Effects of Geopolitical Oil Supply Shocks Over the past four decades, the volatility of oil prices during periods of rising geopolitical risk was nearly twice that during periods when perceptions of geopolitical risk were stable. Geopolitical oil supply shocks increase oil prices by about twice as much as estimates covering all types of oil supply shocks. Geopolitical oil shocks also exhibit strong spillovers to other commodity prices. Oil inventories, after an initial drop, typically surpass their pre-shock level in the medium-term after a geopolitical oil supply shock-a notable difference compared with other types of supply shocks. Source: worldbank.org |
IMF Staff Country Report Singapore: Selected Issues
July 20, 2026-Private consumption ratios differ markedly across advanced economies, with Singapore recording one of the lowest of its peer group. Using a sample of 31 advanced economies and a rich set of potential drivers, the analysis finds that slow-moving structural factors like demographics, economic structure, and development levels are important correlates of these differences, while cyclical factors appear to play a more limited role.
Graying Asia: How Aging Is Reshaping Banking
July 17, 2026--Summary
This paper explores how demographic shifts, particularly population aging, are reshaping banking in Asia-Pacific’s bank-dominated financial systems. Using household surveys as well as bank-level and country-level panel data, we show that aging populations are associated, with shifts in bank portfolios away from traditional loans (with lower loan-to-deposit and loan-to-asset ratios), driven by changes in households' financial behavior.
The Changing Landscape of Financial Integration in Asia-Pacific
July 17, 2026--Summary
Asia-Pacific has undergone a profound transformation over the past few decades, increasing its share in global trade and GDP. This paper assesses to what extent Asia-Pacific's role in global finance has expanded commensurately and whether it has become more integrated by systematically analyzing crossborder financial data.
What Drives Crypto Mining? Evidence from Hardware Imports
July 10, 2026-Summary
Understanding financial activity beyond traditional regulatory frameworks is essential for policymakers. Yet cryptocurrency mining-which offers a direct entry point into the crypto ecosystem without relying on traditional financial intermediaries-remains highly opaque.
Aggregate Gains from AI and Their Distribution: Global Evidence from Usage Data
July 10, 2026-Summary
How large are the gains from AI, and how are they distributed across occupations? Using five waves of the Anthropic Economic Index (January 2025 to February 2026), we construct two novel measures from observed AI usage across countries over the world.
Gold in Central Bank Reserves: Strategic Considerations, Market Risks, and Practical Guidance
July 9, 2026-Gold has re-emerged as a prominent component of central bank reserves, largely reflecting valuation gains from higher gold prices rather than large-scale accumulation. This Note assesses gold's role from a reserve management perspective, emphasizing that while gold carries no credit risk and may support long-term balance-sheet resilience, it is highly volatile, offers only conditional hedging and diversification benefits, and is ill-suited to the liquidity tranche of reserves.
Financial Market Infrastructures Evolution in a Tokenized Economy
July 2, 2026-Summary
This paper examines how tokenization and distributed ledger technology may transform Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs) by enabling smart contracts to perform a growing share of functions traditionally undertaken by central securities depositories, central counterparties, and trade repositories.
The Global Versus Local Identification of Macroeconomic Damages
June 30, 2026--Key takeaways:
Adrien Bilal and Diego R. Känzig's "The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global Versus Local Temperature" (QJE, 2026) challenges the conventional approach of estimating physical climate risk-induced macroeconomic damages.
The paper argues that global temperature variation may capture a broader macroeconomic climate signal than local temperature variability alone, leading to substantially higher damage estimates than those reported in much of the established literature.
Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity in the Financial Sector
June 30, 2026-Summary
Artificial intelligence is reshaping cyber risk in the financial sector by accelerating the speed, frequency, and breadth of vulnerability discovery and potential exploitation. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in financial institutions and market infrastructures, it can strengthen cyber defense but also heighten systemic risk-particularly through shared digital infrastructure, common service providers, and machine-speed attack-defense dynamics that outpace human response.
Ireland: Selected Issues
June 29, 2026-The Irish economy has remained resilient amid trade and geopolitical tensions, but its favorable outlook faces challenges and uncertainties.
