The downside risk scenarios identified in the latest flagship reports by international organisations (IMF, OECD, WB, UN, EC) and central banks (BIS, ECB, US Federal reserve) are recapped in the following flow chart – including where they intersect most. Overall, the most cited risk scenarios: (i) a monetary tightening that gets out of control because …
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How should a “sustainable” financial investment be defined? The European Responsible Investment Framework, including the 2019 Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and the 2020 Environmental Taxonomy, draws three fundamental principles: This European process, clarifying what constitutes sustainable investment, is obviously welcome. Implementing and interpreting the SFDR has not been easy, however. The concerns are twofold: …
Continue reading “A reality test for the European definition of sustainable investment”
Geopolitical risks feature unusually high in economic outlooks by international organisations. The challenge for economists is to predict and “quantify” the economic consequences of geopolitical tensions and armed conflicts. Broad trends can of course be drawn with respect to trade and investment flows (retrenchment) and to the efficiency of multilateralism (weakening and polarisation). From an …
Public pensions in France would be equivalent to 14% of GDP, an alarming level for many observers. This figure comes from the OECD Economic Survey of France 2021. What concerns OECD economists is not so much the financial sustainability of the system, but the share in public spending, and in GDP points, compared to the …
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The traditional batch of annual economic outlook reports released end of 2022 and in January this year – including the IMF (October & January update ), OECD (November), World Bank (January), the European Commission (November), the European Central Bank (December) & US Federal Reserve (November) – all come with the same message: at best the …
Continue reading “The outlook and downside risk scenarios for 2023-2024”
Despite its centrality to the discussion on tax evasion and tax avoidance, there is no established and stable definition of a “tax haven”. Two approaches coexist: (i) a legal approach aiming at identifying “non-cooperative” jurisdictions in international cooperation to curb tax evasion (OECD Global Forum, EU official list) and (ii) an economic significance approach primarily …
Shareholder activism, we are told, is on the rise. The number of campaigns, both shareholder value and environmental, social and governance (ESG) oriented, is expected to pick up in the US, while Europe is poised to enter a “golden age” of activism. Shareholder activism emerged in the early 1990ies within the broader movement toward greater …
The escalating concentration in the digital economy has led to a seriously crowded regulatory agenda in 2022 in both the E.U. and the U.S. While the U.S. Federal-level agenda is much focussed on competition aspects, the E.U. has a broader scope, including data privacy and transfer. Akin to the post-2008 supervision of “too-big-to-fail” banks, the …
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On 19 September 2022, the OECD released a proposal of revision of the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance. First drafted in 1999 as a set of OECD Principles (following the Russian and Asian Financial crises), the Principles were substantially revised in 2004 (Enron & WorldCom scandals) and then lightly updated in 2015, when the text …
In the past year, the responsible investment community has gone through more developments than in the previous 10 years combined. By the end of 2023, we should have a new G20-endorsed global standard on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, more stringent disclosure requirements for both listed equity and asset managers in both the EU …
