Today, the European Commission has proposed ambitious new CO2 emissions targets for new heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) from 2030 onwards. These targets will help to reduce CO2 emissions in the transport sector - trucks, city buses, and long-distance buses are responsible for over 6% of total EU greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and more than 25% of GHG emissions from road transport. These strengthened emissions standards would ensure that this segment of the road transport sector contributes to the shift to...

Read more

Almost one year after Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine, the EU economy entered 2023 on a better footing than projected in autumn. The Winter interim Forecast lifts the growth outlook for this year to 0.8% in the EU and 0.9% in the euro area. Both areas are now set to narrowly avoid the technical recession that was anticipated for the turn of the year. The forecast also slightly lowers the projections for inflation for both 2023...

Read more

US historian Gary Gerstle explains how globalization helped entrench neoliberalism while also bringing about its demise Some moments in US history need decades to be fully grasped—they aren’t bound by the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles. Such periods, called “political orders” by US historian and Cambridge professor of American history Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, are a new way of rethinking political time. The New Deal and the neoliberalism that followed were...

Read more

Today, the first baseline reports on the implementation of the Code of Practice are available online, as the first version of the Transparency Centre of the Code of Practice on Disinformation goes live. 30 Signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation, including all major online platform signatories (Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, Twitter), have submitted their first baseline reports on the implementation of the commitments they took under the Code of Practice on Disinformation. Signatories had six months after signing the...

Read more

Today, the Commission has proposed detailed rules to define what constitutes renewable hydrogen in the EU, with the adoption of two Delegated Acts required under the Renewable Energy Directive. These Acts are part of a broad EU regulatory framework for hydrogen which includes energy infrastructure investments and state aid rules, and legislative targets for renewable hydrogen for the industry and transport sectors. They will ensure that all renewable fuels of non-biological origin (also known as RFNBOs) are produced from...

Read more

Novel survey shows how concerned people are about climate change, how they view mitigation polices, and what drives support for climate action People across the world worry about climate change, but that concern alone doesn’t translate into support for climate mitigation policies. That’s our finding based on a recent survey designed to better illustrate how people perceive the risks from climate change and their support for government climate actions. Responses also show that those who were more concerned about climate change tend...

Read more

Speech by Governor Christopher J. Waller at the 2023 Arkansas State University Agribusiness Conference, Jonesboro, Arkansas, February 08, 2023 | Thank you, Bert, and thank you for the opportunity to talk about where the economy is heading, what the Federal Reserve is doing to get inflation back down to our 2 percent goal, and how all that is likely to affect American agriculture.1 The big picture is that the U.S. economy is adjusting well so far to the higher interest rates...

Read more

Trade openness increased after the Second World War, but has slowed following the global financial crisis The free flow of ideas, people, goods, services, and capital across national borders leads to greater economic integration. But globalization, the trend toward these things moving ever more freely between nations, has seen ebbs and flows over the decades. Those trends are coming into sharper focus this year as policymakers work to understand and address the prospect of geoeconomic fragmentation, which threatens to undo the...

Read more

The European Union – together with the international G7+ Price Cap Coalition – have today adopted further price caps for seaborne Russian petroleum products (such as diesel and fuel oil). This decision will hit Russia's revenues even harder and reduce its ability to wage war in Ukraine. It will also help stabilise global energy markets, benefitting countries across the world. It comes on top of the price cap for crude oil in force since December 2022, and will complement the...

Read more

The ECB has asked people in the euro area how they pay and which payment methods they prefer. The ECB Blog discusses our survey findings and what they mean for the future of cash and digital means of payment. Digitalisation has changed, and will continue to change, the way people make payments. Today’s payment options are in some ways unrecognisable from what was available a decade ago. Using a device or app, you might pay for your groceries with your...

Read more