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Shock and Ore — India’s Love of Gold Goes Beyond Market Prices
Gold is considered the most valuable of all the precious metals — especially in Indian culture. While the fabulous ore holds value around the world, Indians often keep it for reasons that extend beyond monetary worth. Its purity makes it
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Glued to the Box, or Linked to a Laptop? Streaming is Up-ending Entertainment
Digital consumer habits are reshaping the entertainment industry. A recent report by consulting firm Deloitte found that UK residents are now more likely than ever to have multiple subscription-based, on-demand services for film, TV, and video games. That shift, and
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All the World is But a Console, and Gaming Sector is Thriving
The at-home entertainment industry has thrived as enforced isolation and diminished human contact have drawn more people into gaming. Steam, the most popular online PC game store, has an unprecedented number of concurrent users — 20 million of them —
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John Gandolfo, IFC’s Treasurer: Looking Towards Recovery from Covid-19 and a Green, Resilient, Inclusive Future
The Covid-19 crisis has impacted the health and livelihoods of many millions of people across the planet, and it continues to impose an enormous toll on the poor, threatening decades of progress towards raising living standards in the developing world.
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Sports United by a Common Goal: Getting Bums Safely Back on Seats
Sport has cultural and economic importance; every country celebrates stars and leagues and teams in some form. It’s one of the great unifiers. Sporting events are social events, and — as with some many other aspects of modern life —
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Click OK and Call Me in the Morning — How Online has Changed Shopping for Meds
Social media have been on about the New Normal since the start of the pandemic. People are still looking forward to a time where quarantines and lockdown orders are things of the past. But no one has much idea of
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The Gig is Up … or Is It?
The gig economy is anything but stable — but it can be the last line of defence in a crisis, argues Yogesh Patel The pandemic has left 25.7m people in the US either without work or facing pay cuts. In
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Global Imbalances and the Pandemic
The International Monetary Fund’s tenth annual External Sector Report (ESR, August 2021) shows how current account deficits in the global economy widened in 2020 during the pandemic. On the other hand, the ESR also argues that overall, the misalignment between
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World Bank on Sustainable Recovery: The Need for Long-Term Financing
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting every country’s health system and economy to a degree not seen for a century or more. In developing countries, mounting an adequate response to address these simultaneous shocks has created fiscal challenges, especially for those
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Poland Closes the Gap and Calms Covid Jitters with a Bold Programme of Reform
The pandemic has brought an end to its 30 years of GDP growth for Poland — but this should be seen as an interruption rather than a break. Poland does it again. Since Solidarity brought the end of communist control,
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