The Last Word: AI’s next battle is not the model, but the organisation. From ‘What can the model do?’ to ‘What can the organisation absorb?’ For the past few years, attention has centred on the models: who had the smartest system, the fastest capability gains and the most impress … | Continue reading
Kazakhstan’s economy is growing at a decent rate, but its workforce is not. Schools, vocational training, and adult skills must be improved. In January 2025, Chevron announced first oil from the Future Growth Project at the Tengiz field in western Kazakhstan. The 48 billion US do … | Continue reading
Mongolia has a bold plan, a surplus, and good demographics. The economy still runs on copper, however, and the copper boom is part of why. In May 2025, Mongolia’s State Training Fund announced a change to the country’s overseas-study loans. Until then, the most promising Mongoli … | Continue reading
As bilateral aid retreats, the world’s development banks are reaching further than ever. Their critics worry that they have lost the plot. In London in mid-May 2025, at its first Annual Meeting in the city for nine years, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s go … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Leadership alignment, behaviour, and talent matter far more than whether employees are merely experimenting with AI tools. For the past two years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has largely been framed as a technology race: which firms are adopting … | Continue reading
Half of Europeans never use public transport. Freebies are an easy answer, but as some countries have found out, they don’t ease congestion. Eurostat published a transport snapshot in March showing that just over half of EU adults (50.6 per cent) did not use public transport at a … | Continue reading
Restrictions on the export of critical raw materials are surging. Producers may regret it, for they deliver revenue, briefly, but then what? Mathias Cormann opened the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul in April with … | Continue reading
Geography is becoming the least interesting barrier between Canada and the European Union. But the maple leaf will never fly over Brussels. This week in Yerevan, Mark Carney took his seat at the eighth summit of the European Political Community, between Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’ … | Continue reading
The 2026 RSF Index reframes the work of protecting journalists. Norway held the top spot on the World Press Freedom Index for the 10th straight year, but the rest of the 2026 rankings released by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) this week tell a colder story. For the first time si … | Continue reading
The Last Word: The future belongs to those who fix what they once ignored, and build organisations that deliver innovation when it matters. For nearly two decades, interest in the word ‘innovation’ barely moved. It sat in a narrow band, steady and unremarkable, like background mu … | Continue reading
CEE growth is so far holding up against the Iran energy shock. But the extended-workbench model is faltering, and Ukraine’s outlook is dire. Growth across most of the economies of Central, East and Southeast Europe remains resilient despite the energy-price shock from the Iran wa … | Continue reading
A 50 billion euros data centre in a Croatian backwater is exactly the kind of project that the Three Seas Initiative was created to deliver. Topusko is not where you would expect to find 50 billion euros. The town in central Croatia, tucked between Zagreb and the Bosnian border, … | Continue reading
It goes live in August, and most of Europe isn’t ready. In four months, law enforcement authorities across the European Union will gain the power to compel service providers in other member states to hand over electronic evidence within 10 days—or in emergencies, just eight hours … | Continue reading
Countries that recognise nomads as potential long-term contributors create frameworks for sovereignty and pathways to permanent residency. The Instagram fantasy is fading. As the first generation of digital nomads approaches middle age (the average nomad is now 36 years old) the … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Leadership today requires courage to reinvent, to reimagine, and to retire assumptions before markets retire them for you. For the better part of the last couple of years, leaders have warned of a looming skills crisis. Workers, we are told, are unprepared for ar … | Continue reading
Montenegro is closing in on European Union membership. Croatia’s experience suggests businesses have less time to prepare than they think. It’s been a long old slog, but Montenegro does finally appear to be closing in on EU membership. This week, the EU’s member states agreed to … | Continue reading
The EU’s AccelerateEU plan points in the right direction. Whether member states follow at the speed Europe needs is another matter entirely. For the second time in less than five years, Europeans are paying the price of Europe’s dependency on imported fossil fuels. AccelerateEU i … | Continue reading
Hungary’s drubbing in Luxembourg shows why the sovereigntists are half right: EU members can’t just do what they want. That’s a good thing. The European Court of Justice rarely sits as a Full Court. On April 21 it did so to deliver a comprehensive drubbing to Hungary. Its 2021 ‘c … | Continue reading
The darker side of digital nomadism. Our ability to work from anywhere creates challenges for nomads and policymakers alike. The laptop-toting, café-hopping digital nomad has become the poster child for modern work-life balance. However, behind the Instagram-worthy sunsets and be … | Continue reading
In the first of a short series of articles looking at the economy of Mongolia, we take a look at where the country has made good progress. When Moody’s and S&P upgraded Mongolia’s sovereign credit rating in the second half of 2025 (the former to B1, the latter to BB-), it barely … | Continue reading
The IMF’s headline growth and forecast figures probably matter far less than they appear to. So why continue to make such a fuss about them? On April 14, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s chief economist, opened a press conference in Washington by announcing that global growth … | Continue reading
The Last Word: We’re not entering the age of artificial intelligence. We’re re-entering the age of energy, this time with better marketing. Europe has spent much of April watching the Strait of Hormuz like a pressure gauge on the boiler room of the global economy. In recent days, … | Continue reading
What Italian espresso bars and their cheap coffee can teach businesses about keeping things simple: Do just one thing, and do it very well. Bardonecchia, an hour and a half on the train from Turin, just a few hundred metres from the French border, is a fairly standard Italian ski … | Continue reading
Harm reduction is not a lowering of standards or moral compromise; it is the standard itself, once the illusion of purity has been removed. The argument over how society should respond to addiction is usually framed in medical or political terms, but beneath it lies a moral dispu … | Continue reading
Climate leadership requires more than just ambition. Targets need to be supported by stable, investor-grade frameworks, says Timur Tillyaev. Europe’s climate credentials are, in theory, unmatched. The European Green Deal, the ‘Fit for 55’ package, and a series of national net-zer … | Continue reading
The case for institutionalising long-term thinking in government is growing, but the results of experiments carried out so far are mixed. The Welsh government’s Future Generations Commissioner publishes an annual report, and the 2025 edition runs to 147 pages. It covers climate t … | Continue reading
We wanted smarter legal tech, but instead got an expensive dependency. The legal industry poured billions into artificial intelligence with a seductive promise: faster reviews, leaner operations, sharper insights. What it got, increasingly, looks like the same old work wearing a … | Continue reading
The case for small, agile allies: Strategic realism for a paradigm of distributed deterrence. There is a compelling and underappreciated case for prioritising smaller, agile partners within the architecture of American alliances. The pull toward large, economically powerful partn … | Continue reading
Hungary’s election result is a gift for investors, if the new government can deliver swift reform. In the end, it wasn’t even close. After sixteen years in office, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was trounced in a parliamentary election in Hungary on April 12, winning just 55 seats i … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Work is no longer about location A few weeks ago, I listened to yet another office-versus-remote panel discussion and had the distinct feeling of watching executives argue over the seating plan on a ship whose engine had already been replaced. The familiar position … | Continue reading
Inside Lithuania’s push to build entrepreneurs before they graduate. Education systems across Europe are under pressure to keep pace with rapid technological change. Estonia, for example, is introducing artificial intelligence into classrooms through a nationwide initiative, whil … | Continue reading
Europe and Central Asia’s governments are spending more than ever on steering their economies. They are mostly pointing in the wrong direction. The World Bank rarely minces its words. Its spring economic update for Europe and Central Asia (ECA), published on April 8, delivered a … | Continue reading
Ranked 32nd out of 32 countries, Tajikistan’s IT sector barely exists. Recent digital governance initiatives at least suggest ambition. Tajikistan occupies an unenviable position: dead last in Reinvantage’s IT Competitiveness Index, ranking 32nd out of 32 countries and trailing B … | Continue reading
Armenia’s economy is thriving as it loosens ties with Russia and looks towards Brussels. That may be no coincidence. It was, even by the standards of what passes as Kremlin diplomacy, an extraordinary piece of theatre. On April 1, Vladimir Putin sat across from Nikol Pashinyan, A … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Readiness beats past performance. It is still considered good management to hit your numbers. Revenue targets met, costs controlled, margins protected, the dashboard glowing green, the board reassured that performance is on track. It all looks sensible, disciplined … | Continue reading
Hungary’s exhausted growth model may depend on a change of government to get moving again. For a country that built its modern economic identity on luring foreign factories, Hungary finds itself in a peculiar bind. The factories came and unemployment fell. And then the model, lik … | Continue reading
Europe throws billions at its defence sector. Ukraine’s kitchen-table innovators are already cashing in. Great news for Ukrainian housewives. The European Commission this week approved a 1.5 billion euros work programme under its European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP), and 26 … | Continue reading
The Last Word: When predictability becomes the product. In a hall full of global executives in Beijing last week, the pitch was not what it used to be. No talk of breakneck growth, no grand promises of limitless expansion. Instead, China’s premier, Li Qiang, offered something mor … | Continue reading
With ICT exports at 5.02 per cent of GDP and value added at 8.51 per cent, Serbia has built the Balkans’ most export-oriented tech sector. Serbia has assembled one of the region’s most impressive tech sectors. ICT exports reached 5.02 per cent of GDP in 2024—the second-highest am … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence was supposed to make work fairer. New data suggest it may do the opposite. When Anne, a data entry clerk, watched an IBM PC arrive on her desk in 1986, her job was gone within a year. Four decades on, a social-media manager watches ChatGPT draft the posts … | Continue reading
The EU’s new deals with Australia are really about minerals, missiles, and the retreat of American reliability. In September 2021, France recalled its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra after Australia cancelled a 56 billion euros submarine contract in favour of a nuclear d … | Continue reading
The M&A risk of confusing market velocity with marketing capability. During the dot-com boom, an entire generation of technology marketers briefly concluded they were geniuses. Campaigns worked. Brands scaled overnight. Valuations soared on the back of market energy that felt, in … | Continue reading
Founders who delay monetisation think they are being patient. Andrew Wrobel’s new book argues they are being shaped. Ask a founder to pitch their start-up and the words tend to come quickly. The product, its features, the roadmap, the competition. Andrew Wrobel has heard hundreds … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Companies must change to stay relevant. For years, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland and Romania have occupied a flattering place in Europe’s economic imagination: diligent improvers, able manufacturers, reliable beneficiaries of integration. It is not a false story—over t … | Continue reading
Policymakers obsess over trade agreements. Traders care about markets and logistics, says Timur Tillyaev. Trade policy is increasingly linked with international diplomacy. Governments debate tariffs, free trade agreements, and strategic corridors as if commerce were mainly a matt … | Continue reading
Policymakers obsess over trade agreements. Traders care about markets and logistics. Trade policy is increasingly linked with international diplomacy. Governments debate tariffs, free trade agreements, and strategic corridors as if commerce were mainly a matter of international r … | Continue reading
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turbocharged Poland’s tech sector. Sustaining momentum once the war ends is another matter. Poland, its IT sector at least, has been a beneficiary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since 2022, the country has absorbed Ukrainian IT specialists, host … | Continue reading
Romania’s two decades of income catch-up are under threat from a fiscal deficit that would give most finance ministers nightmares. In 2025, Romania finally joined the Schengen Area, a milestone that felt to many Romanians like belated acknowledgement of the country’s transformati … | Continue reading