AnalysisDC retweeted
#Spain and #Portugal have become relatively stronger borrowers, while #France has become relatively more vulnerable. @MorganStanley expects these changing fundamentals to keep reducing the historical distinction b/w core and peripheral euro-area bond markets, chart
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The global economy faces three major crosscurrents: rapid arrival of AI, high energy prices, and record levels of public debt. IMF Managing Director @KGeorgieva explains how success will depend on how these crosscurrents are navigated. Watch her speech imf.org/en/news/articles/202…
AnalysisDC retweeted
A new #geopolitical economy of resources - The #electrification transition is reshaping global economic power, chart @PictetAM
AnalysisDC retweeted
The Malacca Strait is not just vital to Asia. Eritrea sent 90% of its exports through the strait in 2024, while Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya each received more than 40% of their imports through this critical maritime corridor. Read more in this #CSIS analysis: buff.ly/StML4MU
AnalysisDC retweeted
#China 's FX reserves rose more than expected in Aug, CB data showed on Monday, as the dollar extended its weakness. The country's FX reserves — the world's largest — stood at $3.438trn last month, versus $3.419trn a month earlier, chart @wsj wsj.com/economy/chinas-forei…
9 September 17:00 CEST International Macro History Online Seminar #IMHOS
🗣️Kevin O'Rourke (@sciencespo & CEPR) presents 'The International Transmission of Commodity Shocks: High-Frequency Evidence from Futures Markets in the Interwar Period'
Chair: Kirsten Wandschneider (@goetheuni & CEPR)
✍️ ow.ly/XW8p50ZKirk
AnalysisDC retweeted
Se van afinando los cálculos del impacto de la IA en el empleo.
Me encontré con este mapita que cuantifica su efecto sobre cada ocupación para EEUU: liminal-capital.com/apps/ai-…
Desagrega su impacto entre 3 efectos distintos:
1) Efecto sustitución (S): la IA reemplaza tareas humanas. Esto destruiría empleos.
2) Efecto complementario (C): la IA puede hacer tareas humanas pero necesita de la presencia del humano para realizarla. Esto tiene el potencial de crear empleo o al menos no hacerlo desaparecer.
3) "Aislación" de la IA (I): no hay forma todavía de automatizar ese empleo.
Por ejemplo, al puesto de "financial advisor" le asignan 48% sustitución (S) y 52% complemento (C), a "educadores": S: 29% / C: 54% , a desarrolladores web S: 94% / C: 3% , y así.
En este paper los autores explican cómo se calcula todo: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
Dos reflexiones más de ahí que me parecieron interesantes:
1) lo que hace/deja de hacer la IA son "tareas" no "empleos". Por lo que es importante distinguir qué parte de cada empleo es reemplazable/potenciable/aislado de la IA para cuantificar su riesgo de automatización general.
2) el impacto empírico de la IA se ve más en los ingresos nuevos de empleados y no tanto en las personas ya empleadas, por lo que una regresión sobre las contrataciones nuevas puede/va a dar resultados distintos que las conclusiones que se pueden sacar de cálculos sobre la masa total de empleados.
Creo que todavía no tenemos del todo la info disponible acá para replicar algo así, pero estaría interesante.
AnalysisDC retweeted
Learn how to work with geographic data, create spatial visualizations, explore patterns, and turn location-based data into meaningful insights usin
pyoflife.com/an-introduction…
#RStats #RProgramming #SpatialData #DataScience #GIS #DataVisualization #Statistics #Geospatial
AnalysisDC retweeted
City2Graph is a new Python library that transforms geospatial data like buildings, streets, and transit feeds into heterogeneous graphs, bridging GeoPandas and PyTorch Geometric for…
github.com/c2g-dev/city2grap…
#MachineLearning #AI #LLM #DeepLearning #AgenticAI
AnalysisDC retweeted
Urban planning models just crossed 90% accuracy using free map data anyone can edit.
A new paper builds a single deep learning pipeline that turns OpenStreetMap into a full urban intelligence system. Land use, buildings, traffic, and air quality all predicted together, not separately. 
Most studies treat these as isolated problems. One model for land use. Another for traffic. Another for pollution.
This one connects them.
The system fuses three data layers:
• OpenStreetMap for structure
• Satellite imagery for surface detail
• Environmental and demographic data for context 
Then assigns each task a specialised model:
• CNNs for land use
• U-Net for building footprints
• LSTMs for traffic
• Hybrid models for air quality 
Each model solves its own problem. The pipeline ties them into one view of the city.
The results are pretty strong:
• Land use classification: 91.6% accuracy
• Building detection: 94.0% accuracy
• Traffic prediction error: 3.6 vehicles per hour
• Air quality prediction error: 2.3 µg/m³ 
These sit at the upper end of current GeoAI benchmarks.
The improvement comes from integration.
OpenStreetMap gives topology.
Satellite data gives physical signals.
Environmental data gives dynamics.
Each fills gaps in the others.
That reduces ambiguity where models usually struggle. Mixed-use zones. Dense urban cores. Noisy or incomplete maps.
The system learns a more complete representation of the city.
The workflow is quite simple:
1.Collect multi-source data
2.Align and standardise it
3.Train task-specific models
4.Combine outputs into urban indicators 
Raw geodata in. Policy-relevant outputs out.
The implications are practical.
Traffic models identify congestion hotspots.
Land use maps reveal missing green space.
Building extraction supports infrastructure planning.
Air quality forecasts guide mitigation. 
All from largely open data.
The constraint is compute.
Training requires GPUs and careful preprocessing. Smaller cities may struggle to deploy this directly.
Data quality also matters. OpenStreetMap varies by location.
Even so, the direction is clear.
Urban planning is shifting from static GIS layers to integrated, predictive systems.
One pipeline. Multiple urban signals. Continuous updates.
Cities are becoming modelled environments, not just mapped ones.Urban planning models just crossed 90% accuracy using map data that anyone can edit.
A new paper builds a single deep learning pipeline that turns OpenStreetMap into a full urban intelligence system, predicting land use, buildings, traffic, and air quality together rather than treating them as separate problems. 
Most existing work fragments the city into isolated tasks. One model classifies land use. Another extracts buildings. A third forecasts traffic. This paper links them into a single system.
The key idea is simple. Combine three types of data that each see the city differently:
• OpenStreetMap provides structure such as roads, buildings, and land use
• Satellite imagery captures physical and spectral detail
• Environmental and demographic data add temporal and social context 
Each task is then handled by a model suited to its structure. CNNs for land use, U-Net for building footprints, LSTMs for traffic, and hybrid models for air quality. The novelty is that all outputs are combined into one coherent view of the city rather than analysed in isolation.
The performance is strong across the board. Land use classification reaches 91.6% accuracy. Building detection hits 94.0%. Traffic prediction errors fall to 3.6 vehicles per hour, and air quality prediction to 2.3 µg/m³. 
These results sit at the upper end of current GeoAI benchmarks, and the reason is not a single model improvement. It is the interaction between data sources.
OpenStreetMap encodes topology but misses detail. Satellite imagery captures detail but struggles with semantics. Environmental data adds dynamics but lacks spatial structure. When combined, each compensates for the others, reducing ambiguity in dense or mixed-use areas where models typically fail.
The workflow follows a clear pipeline. Multi-source data is collected, aligned, and standardised. Task-specific models are trained. Their outputs are then fused into multi-dimensional urban indicators that describe structure, function, mobility, and environment together. 
This produces something closer to a live model of the city rather than a static map.
The implications are practical. Traffic forecasts identify congestion hotspots. Land use maps reveal gaps in green space. Building extraction supports infrastructure planning. Air quality predictions guide mitigation strategies. 
All of this is built largely on open data.
Link to full paper: nature.com/articles/s41598-0…
AnalysisDC retweeted
Great Books for Summer or Winter Reading: Thought-provoking, perhaps controversial, and definitely worth reading!
"The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve" by Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel.
amzn.to/4c66Bnu
"In this elegant and accessible book, Binder and Spindel shed new light on this tension between economics and politics. Their conclusion, that the Fed’s independence is at best fragile and at worst illusory, amounts to a fundamental challenge to conventional thinking about monetary policy in the United States." (Barry Eichengreen)
"Born out of crisis a century ago, the Federal Reserve has become the most powerful macroeconomic policymaker and financial regulator in the world. The Myth of Independence marshals archival sources, interviews, and statistical analyses to trace the Fed’s transformation from a weak, secretive, and decentralized institution in 1913 to a remarkably transparent central bank a century later. Offering a unique account of Congress’s role in steering this evolution, Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel explore the Fed’s past, present, and future and challenge the myth of its independence."
amzn.to/4c66Bnu
AnalysisDC retweeted
Very valuable!
"How Currency Markets Work: An Insider's Guide to a System Driven by Geopolitics and Trader Psychology" by Andrew Nissenbaum and Patrick Cullen.
"In How Currency Markets Work, a veteran currency trader and a geopolitical risk analyst deliver a comprehensive and street-smart guide for understanding currency markets. The authors combine insights from the worlds of trading, economics, and geopolitics to create an eye-opening and original new take on how currency prices are determined. This book bridges the gap between how currency markets are taught and how they actually trade, using character-driven narratives built on real-world market events and data to explain currency trading successes and failures in intuitive and practical ways."
amzn.to/4gxsU77
AnalysisDC retweeted
I was just about to read this article. But I stumbled over the very first sentence. “… dependent on bond markets to fund spending" implies Govt spending is constrained by the willingness of bond investors to lend, chart @FT
ft.com/content/b48dd083-0cdb…
AnalysisDC retweeted
Super interesting!
"The U.S.–China Trade War and the Geography of Global Production" by Harald Fadinger, Lei Li, Sophia Praetorius, and Jan Schymik.
"We study how the U.S.–China trade war affected manufacturing activity in third countries using a novel plant-level dataset covering millions of establishments in 50 major economies, including affiliates of more than 200,000 multinational enterprises (MNEs). Combining establishment-level data with detailed tariff information, we estimate the effects of U.S. and Chinese punitive bilateral output and input tariffs on sales, employment, and establishments across countries, industries, and stages of production. We find that third-country effects of the trade war are highly heterogeneous and largely offsetting, yielding moderately negative net effects overall. Most of the adjustment is driven by multinational enterprises reallocating activity across affiliate networks, while domestic firms respond much less."
janschymik.de/working/GVC_Tr…
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By the way, are you already a member of the International and Monetary Economics Network? You can join by completing this form:
forms.cloud.microsoft/r/jB5Z…
AnalysisDC retweeted
Everyone’s told plastic pollution is a “global” problem…
But the data say something very different.
Roughly 90–95% of ocean plastic comes from a handful of rivers... mostly in Asia and Africa. The Yangtze. Ganges. Mekong. Nile. Niger.
Not your grocery bag in Colorado.
Not your straw in D.C.
A small number of poorly managed waste systems are doing the overwhelming majority of the damage.
AnalysisDC retweeted
Caixin: "Local governments are struggling to stockpile high-quality projects, which inherently limits their capacity for countercyclical fiscal expansion."
In the past any time economic activity dropped to below a politically-determined minimum level, local governments responded "countercyclically" with large increases in spending, especially on infrastructure, whether or not these generated positive economic returns. In China, economic problems are almost always described as cyclical rather than structural, which is why the rection to any slowdown has usually been to double down on the existing growth model.
But as the costs to this strategy have accumulated – in the form of the second highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world (after Japan's) and the fastest-growing debt-to-GDP ratio in history – it has become increasingly hard for local governments to continue this strategy.
However rather than abandon the strategy of using increasingly non-productive investment to meet political growth targets, i.e. rather than acknowledge the structural nature of the problem, it seems that Beijing will instead just shift the borrowing onto the central government balance sheets.
I think this is likely to be a mistake for the Chinese economy over the longer term, but I also think it is politically hard for them not to make this mistake.
caixinglobal.com/2026-07-24/…
AnalysisDC retweeted
China's Ministry of Finance just rolled out a major 20% tax on offshore trusts, forcing wealthy residents and foreign passport holders to report hidden overseas assets.
Under the new regulations issued by China's State Taxation Administration, any capital transferred into an offshore trust is now taxed at 20% as property gains. Even worse for offshore tax havens, all undistributed annual trust income must be declared and taxed every single year.
Crucially, holding a foreign passport or overseas residency won't protect individuals if their main economic interests remain in China. Authorities are offering a 90-day window for voluntary disclosure before heavy penalties kick in.
With Beijing closing the curtain on offshore wealth structures to shore up domestic revenue, will this trigger another massive wave of capital flight?
AnalysisDC retweeted
1/7
FT: "According to economic theory, productivity and real wages should grow in tandem, with the benefits of new technology being shared with the workers who produce the stuff. But in the US, Europe and Japan, pay growth has decoupled from...
ft.com/content/9741206d-b53f…