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According to the leading German economic research institutes, the German economy is experiencing a drastic slump as a result of the corona pandemic. In order to slow down the wave of infection, the state has severely restricted economic activity in Germany. As a result, GDP is expected to shrink by 4.2% this year. The recession is leaving clear traces on the labour market and the national budget. At its peak, the unemployment rate will soar to 5.9% and the number of short-time workers to 2.4 million. This year, the fiscal policy stabilisation measures will lead to a record deficit in the general government budget of 159 billion euro. After the shutdown, the economy will gradually recover. Accordingly, the increase in GDP next year will be strong at 5.8%. This forecast is associated with considerable downside risks, e.g. because the pandemic can be slowed faster or because the recovery of economic activity will be less successful than expected or there may be a new wave of infection.

Sea level rise will cause spatial shifts in economic activity over the next 200 years. Using a spatially disaggregated, dynamic model of the world economy, this paper estimates the consequences of probabilistic projections of local sea level changes. Under an intermediate scenario of greenhouse gas emissions, permanent flooding is projected to reduce global real GDP by 0.19 percent in present value terms. By the year 2200, a projected 1.46 percent of the population will be displaced. Losses in coastal localities are much larger. When ignoring the dynamic response of investment and migration, the loss in real GDP in 2200 increases from 0.11 percent to 4.5 percent.

A substantial part of production and trade now takes place through global value chains (GVC), making it an essential conduit of knowledge spillover and technology transfer. Yet, extant studies examining how countries become productively efficient and catch-up to the global efficiency frontier through international trade have ignored the possible role of GVC in fast-tracking this process. This paper provides the first empirical evidence that fills this knowledge gap. We propose a two-stage empirical strategy to this end. First, we use a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to compute a measure of productive efficiency—defined herewith as a country’s relative productive efficiency to the global productive efficiency frontier. Second, we use the productive efficiency index as an outcome variable in a reduced-form equation that controls for GVC participation and its interaction with country characteristics that influence the gains from GVC participation. In addition to using the panel fixed effect method, we estimate the reduced-form equation with the difference-GMM to address endogeneity issues, and the Tobit and Fractional Response models to address the bounded nature of the productive efficiency index. We find strong evidence suggesting that GVC participation enables technology-lagging countries to become more productively efficient as well as catch-up to the global efficiency frontier. We also find that the productive efficiency and catch-up gains from GVC participation accrue more strongly to countries that have a high human capital stock, a well-functioning financial market, maintain stable macroeconomic conditions, and specialize in downstream activities in the value chain.

Living up to the expectations of the JIBS Decade Award, Goerzen, Asmussen, and Nielsen’s 2013 paper not only introduced the literature on global cities to the international business (IB) community but continues to be generative. In their “Retrospective and a Looking Forward” paper 10 years later, the authors highlight megatrends about people, places and things, and new contexts and alternative perspectives, and they encourage further new ways of thinking about global cities and IB. This commentary expands upon their framework of three overlapping circles of global issues, global organizations, and global locations, by drawing especially from recent experiences in the U.S. and research in economic geography and allied fields. Facing global issues of climate change, human rights, health, housing, and the impacts of digital technologies on work, cities offer prospects of responding to these challenges, a context for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to consider. Against the backdrop of large-scale global migrations of unskilled, mostly contract, workers to global cities in developed economies, recruitment agencies and advocacy groups for migrants are global organizations as important as MNEs. Finally, the fluidity of physical boundaries, as illustrated by city-regions, world regions beyond traditional Western-centric perspectives, and intra-national variations, is key to analyzing global locations.

The level of average household wealth in all countries is estimated via the determinants of assets and debts for 39 countries which have balance sheet or survey data. The distribution of wealth in all countries is inferred from information on the pattern of wealth ownership for 20 countries (covering 59% of world population). Combining the level and distribution figures suggests that median global wealth was PPP$8,635 in the year 2000, and that PPP$518,361 was needed to belong to the top percentile. The top decile owned 71% of world wealth and the global Gini value was 0.802.

Applying deep learning to images of cropping systems provides new knowledge and insights in research and commercial applications. Semantic segmentation or pixel-wise classification, of RGB images acquired at the ground level, into vegetation and background is a critical step in the estimation of several canopy traits. Current state of the art methodologies based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are trained on datasets acquired under controlled or indoor environments. These models are unable to generalize to real-world images and hence need to be fine-tuned using new labelled datasets. This motivated the creation of the VegAnn - Veg etation Ann otation - dataset, a collection of 3775 multi-crop RGB images acquired for different phenological stages using different systems and platforms in diverse illumination conditions. We anticipate that VegAnn will help improving segmentation algorithm performances, facilitate benchmarking and promote large-scale crop vegetation segmentation research.

Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB) has become a new threat in recent years, owing to its rapidly increasing resistance to antibiotics and new effective therapies are needed to combat this pathogen. Phage therapy is considered to be the most promising alternative for treating CRAB infections. In this study, a novel phage, Ab_WF01, which can lyse clinical CRAB, was isolated and characterized from hospital sewage. The multiplicity of infection, morphology, one-step growth curve, stability, sensitivity, and lytic activity of the phage were also investigated. The genome of phage Ab_WF01 was 41, 317 bp in size with a GC content of 39.12% and encoded 51 open reading frames (ORFs). tRNA, virulence, and antibiotic resistance genes were not detected in the phage genome. Comparative genomic and phylogenetic analyses suggest that phage Ab_WF01 is a novel species of the genus Friunavirus , subfamily Beijerinckvirinae , and family Autographiviridae . The in vivo results showed that phage Ab_WF01 significantly increased the survival rate of CRAB-infected Galleria mellonella (from 0% to 70% at 48 h) and mice (from 0% to 60% for 7 days). Moreover, after day 3 post-infection, phage Ab_WF01 reduced inflammatory response, with strongly ameliorated histological damage and bacterial clearance in infected tissue organs (lungs, liver, and spleen) in mouse CRAB infection model. Taken together, these results show that phage Ab_WF01 holds great promise as a potential alternative agent with excellent stability for against CRAB infections.

Carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CRPA) has emerged as a significant global public health threat due to its increasing prevalence and dissemination, necessitating the development of novel antimicrobial agents. In this regard, bacteriophages, particularly lytic phages, offer a promising alternative to conventional antibiotics for the treatment of such resistant infections. In this study, we isolated and characterized a lytic Pseudomonas phage, Pa_WF01, from hospital sewage, which specifically targets clinical CRPA strains. The host range, multiplicity of infection (MOI), morphology, one-step growth curve, thermal and pH stability, chloroform sensitivity, and lytic activity of Pa_WF01 were evaluated. Our findings showed that the MOI, latent period, and burst size of Pa_WF01 were approximately 0.0001, 10 min, and 154 phages per cell, respectively. Furthermore, Pa_WF01 exhibited robust lytic activity across a broad range of pH values (4–12) and temperatures (4–50 °C), effectively inhibiting bacterial growth. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis supported that Pa_WF01 exhibits morphological characteristics similarity to the Schitoviridae family, and the result was further confirmed by phylogenetic analysis of complete genome sequences. Whole-genome sequencing revealed that Pa_WF01 has a double-stranded DNA genome of 73,369 bp and a GC content of 54.78%, containing 94 open reading frames (ORFs). Notably, no tRNA, virulence, or antibiotic resistance genes were identified within the genome. Phylogenetic tree analysis further classified Pa_WF01 as closely related to phages of the Litunavirus genus. In vivo, Pa_WF01 significantly improved the survival rate of mice infected with CRPA, reduced inflammatory responses, decreased bacterial loads in organs (lung, liver, and spleen), and alleviated organ damage. Additionally, in vitro analysis demonstrated that Pa_WF01 enhanced serum-mediated bactericidal activity. Taken together, these results highlight the potential of phage Pa_WF01 as a viable therapeutic alternative for treating CRPA infections in clinical practice.

The world feels itself to be in transition, but to what is unclear. Will the liberal market model retain its normative primacy once some semblance of normality is restored, or will other varieties of capitalism, with a bigger role of the state, acquire more legitimacy? The answer depends partly on one's explanation for the current crisis. This essay argues, first, that global imbalances had too important a role to ignore, in contrast to a mainstream view that focuses on mistakes in monetary policy and financial regulation. It argues, second, that in light of global dynamics, the crisis is likely to become worse by early 2010—which, on the face of it, makes significant reorganisations of capitalism more likely. The third section lays out what should be done to reconfigure capitalism at national and international levels. The final section discusses the political economy of policy reforms in terms of the difficult translation from what should be done to what can be done. The broad conclusion is that in five years from now the liberal market model will have been restored to normative primacy and ‘we must have more globalization’ will again be the elite rallying cry; but the crisis will have left behind sufficient doubts about factual propositions and value priorities that political parties and economists advocating alternatives will have more scope than they have had for the past three decades.

Before the start of the war in Ukraine, monthly global economic activity indicators for the manufacturing and service sectors had continued to show expansion, although there were signs of slowing manufacturing growth and negative effects on activity due to Covid-19 outbreaks, especially in China. The global composite PMI index edged down to 52.7 in March, but still signalled growth, as the index has now done for almost two years. The decline in the index for manufacturing in the month was more pronounced than that for services and export business noted the fastest decline in the index since July 2020. In China, the increase in Covid-19 cases and renewed lockdowns contributed to a sharp drop in the services PMI in March, which fell from 50.2 to 40, the steepest fall since the start of the pandemic. The manufacturing PMI also fell, but not as sharply, from 50.4 to 48.1. The pandemic has created difficulties in shipping items but falling export orders and market uncertainties over the war in Ukraine were also cited as factors worsening business conditions. The wider ASEAN manufacturing PMI reached a 6-month low in March, although the reading is still consistent with robust growth in the first quarter.