Policy Briefs & Testimonies

8 Items

Servers keep digital currency transactions flowing at light-speed in Ashburn, Va., outside Washington, where Visa has built one of the world's most advanced processing networks, Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010.

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Policy Brief

Central Bank Digital Currencies: Tools for an Inclusive Future?

| September 2020

In this brief, we outline the common motivations driving central bank work on CBDCs. We then explore CBDCs’ potential impacts on financial inclusion, a primary motivation in developing and emerging markets that has also gained significant traction in developed economies during the COVID-19 related global recession. We conclude that for CBDCs to achieve its financial inclusion goals, more technical advancement in offline adaptability and policy deliberations around issues of identity and traceability are needed. 
 

A photo of the Bundesverfassungsgericht ("Federal Constitutional Court") in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Flickr/Al Fed

Policy Brief

Pushing the EU to a Hamiltonian Moment: Germany’s Court Ruling and the Need to Build a Fiscal Capacity Force a Constitutional Debate

May 20, 2020

The recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court on the ECB was an economic and political bombshell. The deep controversy that resulted – within Germany and on a European scale – illustrates that the ambiguity surrounding the euro area’s legal order and architecture may have reached its limit.

The Euro sculpture sits in front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, Apr. 28, 2010. Three weeks away from potential default, Greece saw its borrowing costs spiral higher, a day after Standard & Poor's downgraded its bonds to junk status.

AP Photo

Policy Brief - Quarterly Journal: International Security

A Bleak Future for the European Project

| May 2011

"...[A]bsent an overwhelming threat, the Europeans have had little reason to maintain their economic union. This is not to argue that the demise of the Soviet Union has given them a reason to dismantle the EU—only that it has removed their incentive to preserve it. Consequently, the EU has started to fray as member states have put national interests ahead of those of the union."

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Policy Brief - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Back to the drawing board – regulation and macroeconomics after the crisis

| June 2009

The financial crisis of the last two years has now led to a profound world recession. It calls not just for emergency measures but for major changes in our longer term policy. We need to go back to the drawing board not just on financial regulation but on macroeconomic policy and on macroeconomics itself.

Export Control Development in the United Arab Emirates: From Commitments to Compliance

Policy Brief

Export Control Development in the United Arab Emirates: From Commitments to Compliance

The swiftness with which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has launched its civil nuclear program presents a number of challenges for policymakers in seeking to ensure the program's safety and security. At the onset of its efforts, the UAE government consulted with a set of the world's leading nuclear suppliers to develop a framework that would help its nuclear program conform to the highest standards in terms of safety, security, and nonproliferation. The UAE drew on these consultations in making a sweeping set of international commitments in April 2008 to ensure that the sensitive nuclear materials and technologies it would acquire as part of its nuclear program would be securely controlled.1 While the UAE has been widely praised for the depth and breadth of the nonproliferation commitments it has made, it will be the UAE's efficacy at complying with them by which its success will be judged.