Riccardo Boin, Alex Cosmas, Alex Dichter and Nina Wittkamp – McKinsey & Company The scale of the current crisis in airlines is unprecedented. To recover, the industry will need better data on where and when demand is likely to rebound. In the United States, airline capacity drops are seven to 17 times larger than those during…
David G. Victor, Sadie Frank, Eric Gesick and Parker Bolstad – Brookings As wildfires scorch the west, and multiple hurricanes threaten the Atlantic coasts, it is clear that even amidst a global pandemic the problem of climate change requires attention. One barrier to action has been the inability to get the financial markets fully engaged.…
Heidi Burdett, Heriot-Watt University and Cornelia Simon-Nutbrown, Heriot-Watt University Maerl beds stud the ocean floor like underwater brambles. They’re pastel pink and, despite their knobbly appearance, made up of a red seaweed. This algae has a limestone skeleton which gives it a complex three-dimensional structure that is quite unlike the slimy seaweeds you may be…
Ursula Huws, University of Hertfordshire Even before the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, major upheavals were taking place in the UK labour market. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of people working for online platforms such as Deliveroo and TaskRabbit doubled from 4.7% of the adult population to 9.6% – the equivalent of 5.5 million…
Tera Allas, Jukka Maksimainen, James Manyika and Navjot Singh – McKinsey & Company As income inequality and economic upheaval features more in society, is a guaranteed minimum income worth considering? Results from a two-year experiment in Finland offer clues about the concept of a universal basic income. Globalisation, automation, and the rise in the cost of necessities were increasing pressure on social contracts pre COVID,…
Richard Gowan – Brookings China’s involvement in United Nations peacekeeping illustrates its commitment to the multilateral system, but its contributions to ‘blue helmet’ missions remain limited. In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping impressed other leaders at the U.N. General Assembly with an offer of 8,000 troops to reinforce the organisation’s operations, however this offer has not materialised; as of June…
Craig Mark, Kyoritsu Women’s University Yoshihide Suga is set to be Japan’s new prime minister after he was easily elected leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on Monday. Suga is due to be formally appointed prime minister by a vote in the Japanese parliament on Wednesday, where the conservative LDP has a majority in…
Danny Dorling, University of Oxford It is a conundrum. For much of the past two months, many people have been convinced that mortality associated with COVID-19 would rise as the number of people testing positive with the disease increased. But this has not happened so far. Why? A look at government data from England and…
Mhairi Aitken, Newcastle University Algorithms appear to be in retreat in the UK – for now. Not only did national governments recently U-turn over their use of algorithms to assign the grades of school leavers, but numerous local authorities have also scrapped similar technology used to make decisions on benefits and other welfare services. In…
