News

  
Annual Meetings 2024 Curtain Raiser

Ahead of the 2024 IMF Annual Meetings in Washington, D.C., Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva will deliver a Curtain Raiser speech on the outlook for the global economy and policy priorities.

The 2024 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group

The 2024 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) will take place from Monday, October 21 to Saturday, October 26.

Podcasts

Yuval Noah Harari on Human Evolution and the AI Revolution
October 1, 2024

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 Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. In this podcast, Harari says artificial intelligence is a risk to humankind’s most valuable resource, trust. Transcript

Michele Ruta on Trade Shifts
July 31, 2024

The world is changing so quickly it’s hard to think of one aspect of our economic lives that hasn’t shifted from what it was only a few years ago. Trade is no exception. New technologies, the re-emergence of industrial policy, and rising geopolitical tensions are all putting added pressure on the international trading system. Michele Ruta is a trade expert at the IMF. He says global cooperation is key to preventing economic fragmentation, from which no one benefits. Transcript

Check out the IMF’s global trade webpage

And an entire issue of the IMF's Finance and Development magazine on Trade

Lisa Kolovich: Gender Equality to address Shifting Demographics
July 11, 2024

Aging populations in many advanced and emerging market economies mean shrinking workforces, weighing on growth. However, the opposite is true in low-income countries where populations are growing, and the expanding workforce may lack the skills for the job market. How can these two scenarios offset each other? Lisa Kolovich says women hold the key. Kolovich is an economist in the IMF Inclusion and Gender Unit, which has published a study that shows that supporting women’s health and education isn’t only the right thing to do but helps build critical human capital. In this podcast, Kolovich says gender equality can serve as a stabilizing factor to rebalance demographic trends. Transcript