IMF Podcasts

Dec 19 2024 658 ep. 13 mins 6.6k

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Listen to the World's top economists discuss their research and deconstruct global economic trends.

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Elizabeth Johnson on Fixing Sao Paolo’s Housing Deficit

Dec 19 2024 16 mins

As urbanization continues to grow worldwide, affordable housing is a rare commodity in many cities. Sao Paolo, South America’s biggest city, has gained over 2 million new residents in the past decade alone. Elizabeth Johnson heads Brazil research at TS Lombard and has been studying Sao Paolo’s latest attempt at strengthening its housing strategy. In this podcast, Johnson says

Deniz Igan on The Housing Affordability Crunch

Dec 12 2024 22 mins

While housing markets play a significant role in economies, new research shows houses across 40 countries are less affordable than at any time since the 2008 financial crisis. IMF economist Deniz Igan helped develop the Housing Affordability Index. In this podcast, she says the pandemic triggered an unusual sequence of events that housing markets around the world are still struggli

Driving Change: Ipek Ilkkaracan on Why Investing in Care Pays Off

Dec 04 2024 23 mins

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association’s Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a special series featuring the economist

Driving Change: Rose Ngugi on how Indices are giving Kenya an Edge

Dec 04 2024 22 mins

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association’s Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a special series featuring the economist

Driving Change: Marcela Eslava on Latin America’s Social Security Woes

Dec 04 2024 17 mins

Driving Change: Women-Led Development Economics from the Ground Up The International Economic Association’s Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative (IEA-WE) connects women economists worldwide and helps showcase their important empirical research, especially in developing countries. IMF Podcasts has partnered with the IEA-WE to produce a special series featuring the economist

Reforms amid Great Expectations: Sub-Saharan Africa’s Outlook

Nov 13 2024 21 mins

With sub-Saharan Africa soon to have one of the largest working-age populations in the world, removing barriers to business growth and encouraging higher productivity industries will help provide the employment opportunities it needs. But reforms don’t come easy. Wenjie Chen and Andrew Tiffin are economists in the IMF’s Africa Department and produce the Regional Economic Outloo

Global Financial Stability: Financial Markets Navigate Uncertainty

Oct 22 2024 18 mins

As inflation and interest rates continue to decline and the likelihood of a recession slowly fades, financial markets have seen big equity gains. But the latest Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) warns of several factors that could upend the recovery, including the apparent disconnect between market buoyancy and heightened uncertainty, especially related to geopolitical risks

The Case for a Global Corporate Minimum Tax: Cory Hillier, Shafik Hebous

Oct 10 2024 22 mins

While 21st-century globalization and international trade dramatically changed how multinational corporations operate, the way they are taxed is largely based on early 20th-century thinking. Recent efforts by the OECD and the UN to modernize the international corporate tax system include a minimum corporate tax to make it more equitable. The IMF has also joined the effort by providi

Yuval Noah Harari on Human Evolution and the AI Revolution

Sep 30 2024 31 mins

Stories can unify or divide but our ability to imagine them is uniquely human. Cooperation and trust, built through shared stories and narratives, are the foundation of human societies and economies. So what happens when humans no longer hold the pen? Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author of several books on human evolution, including Sapiens, and Nexus: A Brief

Egypt: Stability Lays Groundwork for Transformation

Sep 25 2024 20 mins

With all the instability within the Middle East and North Africa region of late, Egypt has nonetheless managed to reign in soaring inflation and win its largest-ever foreign investment. Egypt’s efforts to restore macroeconomic stability in recent years have led to an arrangement under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility for Egypt, which makes available US$820 million to help suppo