IMF Podcasts

Mar 03 2025 662 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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Oren Cass on the Invisible Hand

Mar 03 2025 23 mins

Modern economics was built on ideas spelled out by Adam Smith in his 18th-century The Wealth of Nations. But while he used the term only once in that economic treatise, Smith is most remembered for “the invisible hand,” a metaphor Oren Cass says has wrongly been associated with the idea that the pursuit of profit is always socially beneficial and that markets are somehow magica

Driving Change: Rumana Huque on the Real Costs of Bangladesh’s Tobacco Dependency

Feb 28 2025 18 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

Sanjeev Gupta on Health Financing

Feb 25 2025 13 mins

The pandemic was a brutal reminder of how crucial public health systems are, yet health budgets in many countries are still underfunded. Developing economies generally do not allocate sufficient domestic resources to health and external financing is becoming increasingly difficult to secure. Sanjeev Gupta is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and coauthor w

Simon Johnson on Technology, Institutions and Prosperity

Feb 14 2025 26 mins

Countries with better institutions are more prosperous. A truism perhaps, but then why are they so hard to build and sustain? That is the question that Simon Johnson has sought to explain since the fall of communism and the basis for the research that won him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Johnson, a former IMF chief economist, now a professor at MIT in the Sloan School

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