IMF Podcasts

A lot has happened in the global economy since 2019, and few people know that better than Gita Gopinath. As the IMF Chief Economist and subsequently the institution's First Deputy Managing Director, she navigated unprecedented global crises, including the pandemic and the ensuing great lockdown, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, inflation, and geopolitical fragmentation. Her career as a Profess...

As tech innovation, particularly in the field of AI, is increasingly focused on a few key players, the industries benefiting from these tools have also become more concentrated, which Carl Benedikt Frey says could weigh on growth. Frey is an associate professor of AI and Work at Oxford University, and his latest book, How Progress Ends , suggests that waves of technological and economic progress a...

There was a time when economic expertise ruled policy debates at virtually all levels of government. And while trade, taxation, and other important policies are still guided by economic analysis, economists increasingly feel sidelined by politics. In her former roles as chief economist at the US Treasury Department and senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Harvard profe...

Public resistance to new policies often leaves policymakers scratching their heads. What seems a perfectly reasonable policy to a government is often perceived by its citizenry as regressive. Stefanie Stantcheva's multidisciplinary approach to research digs deep into the minds of people at the receiving end to help design better policies. Stantcheva is a professor of economics at Harvard Universit...

Most advanced economies are witnessing their populations age and labor forces shrink, and the same trend is expected to hold for the largest emerging economies within the decade. So the largely touted demographic dividend of previous decades is making way for a demographic drag. Diaa Noureldin is an economist in the World Economic Studies division in the IMF Research Department. In this podcast, h...

After four long years of numerous crises, sub-Saharan Africa's hard-won recovery has been disrupted by yet another shock. The sudden shift in the global outlook has clouded the region's short-term prospects and significantly complicated policy making. Economist Andrew Tiffin and his team produce the IMF  Regional Economic Outlook for sub-Saharan Africa.  In this podcast, Tiffin says the current sh...

While the German economy has been one of Europe's strongest for decades, its performance in recent years has fallen short of expectations. Why is this once economic powerhouse now lagging? Ulrike Malmendier is a professor of economics and finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves on the German Council of Economic Advisors to the German government. In this podcast, Malmendier sa...

Malaysia is one of Southeast Asia's strongest economies and has recently been lauded for its ability to keep inflation in check. But Malaysia is not immune to the rising global trade tensions and uncertainty of late. In this podcast, IMF Asia and Pacific Department head Krishna Srinivasan sits down with Bank Negara Malaysia Governor Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour to discuss the intricacies of central bank...

After years of economic turmoil, Argentina's central bank chief has doubled down on efforts to restore confidence in the Argentine peso and normalize its economy. In this podcast, Governor Santiago Bausili and IMF Western Hemisphere Department head, Rodrigo Valdés discuss the challenging process of stabilizing Argentina's bi-monetary economy. The conversation occurred in the  Governor Talks series...

Never underestimate the value of a good idea. Ideas are the starting point for innovation; few things fuel economic growth more than innovation. However, most of today's innovators emerge from a narrow demographic group with specific backgrounds, which Xavier Jaravel says creates the phenomena of "Lost Einsteins" and "Lost Marie Curies". Jaravel is a professor of economics at the London School of...

Economists have long surmised that people's knowledge and skills contribute significantly to economic development, but to what degree can access to an education change lives? Amory Gethin has compiled data from surveys from more than 150 countries to measure what economists have never measured before: the correlation between education and individual incomes. Gethin is an economist in the World Ban...

While we like to think our financial decisions are based on logic, the truth is, they are largely driven by emotion. So when John Maynard Keynes looked for methods to measure economic fluctuations, animal spirits were a key ingredient. Karthik Sastry is a macroeconomist and assistant professor at Princeton University. In this podcast, he says personal instincts and primal urges are known to cause...

Modern economics was built on ideas spelled out by Adam Smith in his 18 th -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 magically guided by that...

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 economists behind the inval...

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 with Victoria Fan...

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 of Management,...

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 the city looked to i...

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 struggling to correct.  ...

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 economists behind the inval...

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 economists behind the inval...

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 economists behind the inval...

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 Outlook for sub-Saharan A...

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.  Jason Wu and...

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 providing its expertise...

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 History of Info...