Explainers
Evergreen explainers and reference pieces -- with the same browsing experience as research articles.
Base effects
Why year-over-year numbers can look dramatic simply because last year was weird.
Bilateral deficit with China: why it’s a terrible headline metric
Bilateral deficits ignore supply chains and value-added. Here’s why they mislead—and what to use instead.
Capacity factor
Why a country with 10 GW of solar capacity doesn't actually get 10 GW of electricity.
Carbon leakage
When strict climate policy in one country just pushes emissions across the border.
Comparative advantage
Why trade can benefit both sides even when one side is ‘better at everything’—and why that doesn’t settle policy debates.
Consumption vs territorial emissions
The accounting trick that lets rich countries claim they're decarbonizing while importing carbon-heavy goods.
Debt sustainability: why the number that matters isn't the debt level
Japan survives at 250% debt-to-GDP. Argentina collapses at 60%. The difference is everything.
Demographic transition
The four-stage model that explains why populations explode, stabilize, and then shrink — and why most of global economics follows from it.
Dependency ratio
The ratio that tells you how many workers are carrying how many non-workers — and why it's the ticking clock behind every pension crisis.
“China is dumping”: What dumping actually means (and what it doesn’t)
Low prices aren’t automatically dumping. Dumping is a legal test tied to price discrimination and injury.
Dutch disease
How a resource windfall can hollow out the rest of your economy — and why the real disease is mismanagement.
Energy intensity
How much energy it takes to produce a dollar of GDP — and why the trend can mislead you.
Exchange-rate pass-through
How currency moves translate into domestic prices—and why it’s rarely one-for-one.
Capital account / financial account
The mirror image of the current account: how deficits get financed and why ‘money leaving’ is often backwards.
Fiscal breakeven: the price that keeps the lights on
Every petrostate has a magic number — the oil price needed to balance the budget. It almost always goes up.
Food security: It's not about growing everything yourself
Why food security depends on trade routes as much as farmland — and what actually breaks it.
GDP growth headlines: nominal vs real vs per-capita
GDP can rise while living standards stall. Here’s the 3-number checklist that avoids bad headlines.
Governance indicators
What the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators actually measure — and why you should trust the trends more than the rankings.