The European Commission's first review of the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) has found that the regulation is fit for purpose to address distortions in the internal market caused by foreign subsidies. Its objective of maintaining a level playing field in the internal market is widely acknowledged and remains relevant. The review of the first three years of FSR enforcement shows the instrument is working well in practice. The procedures for reviewing concentrations and foreign financial contributions in public procurement procedures...

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IMF F&D MAGAZINE article | Geopolitical rivalry does not end the need for trade cooperation, but the multilateral system must adapt For decades, the global economy rested on the premise that international trade was beneficial despite geopolitical differences. The rules of the multilateral trading system, established with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 and embedded in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, were crafted for a world where governments rarely used trade to achieve geopolitical...

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The European Commission has presented a plan to address the risks and harness the opportunities of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity. While the AI can improve security, it can also be misused to identify vulnerabilities, automate attacks, and significantly increase the scale and speed of cyber incidents. The new plan will bring together EU countries, industry, and EU-level organisations to strengthen the cybersecurity of our digital landscape against the vulnerabilities posed by advanced AI. Key actions Evaluating AI models: The AI Act requires advanced AI models...

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Interview with Les Échos conducted by Guillaume Benoit and Christophe Jakubyszyn on 24 June 2026 On 11 June, the ECB raised its key interest rates. Do you still think that was the right decision, given that just ten days later Iran and the United States agreed a 60-day ceasefire? We are confident that we made the right choice. As early as April, a large majority of Governing Council members were already prepared to take a decision. But at that point we...

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Across the OECD area, the share of science and engineering professionals reached 3.7% of the workforce in 2024; information and communication technology (ICT) professionals grew to 3.1%. R&D personnel in turn rose to almost 1.6%. The professional science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)  workforce has continued to grow across OECD and EU economies, according to the latest data from the Research and Innovation Careers Observatory (ReICO). The share of science and engineering (S&E) professionals rose from 3.2 to 3.7% of total employment across...

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Place-based policies offer regions left behind by globalization a path beyond economic populism. One of the most firmly held beliefs in economics is that free trade is good for humanity. Yet that confidence in the economic virtue of open markets can blind the profession to the complications of deep global economic ties. When in the 1990s the world leapt into frenzied globalization, policymakers touted the potential efficiency gains but gave short shrift to possible painful distributional consequences. Those consequences have...

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