EconPol Forum

How far away is the world from ensuring that every child obtains at least basic skills? And what would it mean for world development to reach the goal of global universal basic skills? This article addresses these two intertwined questions in a new study. The authors draw on the individual-level test data from available international and regional student assessments to develop world estimates of the share of children not achieving basic skills in each country and then show the economic costs of these deficits.

In recent years, radical right-wing political groups and populist movements have strongly gained popularity in many Western democracies. The presidency of Donald Trump and the increasing political polarization in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK, as well as the electoral successes of nationalist parties in many Western countries – such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Rassemblement National in France, the Sweden Democrats, or the Movimento 5 Stelle, Lega, or Fratelli d’Italia in Italy – serve as evidence of this trend. One of the key features of many of these movements is an anti-establishment, anti-immigration, and anti-globalization rhetoric. In this article, we summarize the existing literature studying the extent to which economic causes contribute to the rise in populism.

In January 2024, five politically and economically heterogeneous countries ‒ Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates ‒ joined the BRICS. The BRICS+ countries now represent around 45 percent of the world’s population and around a third of global GDP. The BRICS were originally founded as an economic alternative to the Western bloc led by the USA and the EU. The idea was to offer the countries of the Global South a counterweight to Western institutions. The current change in the geopolitical and geoeconomic framework has driven the expansion of the BRICS. And it will also play an important role in shaping the international order of tomorrow.

Few politicians dare to think aloud about federal models for the European Union. Even as a concept, the federal state is problematic. The perception of an unwieldy organization arises when the goal is a light consensus federation, where the Commission’s power is limited and the member states have more power to run their own affairs. In the European Parliament elections, each state still has its own electoral district. Some member states are divided into several constituencies. There is no need for EU-wide elections at the parliamentary level, nor EU-wide parties.

EU Cohesion Policy constitutes an important item in the EU budget. For the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021–2027, EUR 392 billion is reserved for the promotion of economic and social cohesion among the regions of the European Union. This article presents results from a pilot study that combines official data on projects co-funded by the ERDF and the CF in the programming period 2007–2013, with remote sensing data on night light emission and land cover to assess the effect of EU funding on economic growth at the municipal level, where regional GDP data are not available. Our approach can also be applied in other contexts, for example to study the impact of investment projects funded by Next Generation EU.