Tobias Adrian, Financial Counsellor and Director, Monetary and Capital Markets Department, IMF
EuroFinance, 30th Annual International Treasury Management Week
September 27, 2021
It’s a great pleasure to join you and your “EuroFinance” colleagues here today, at the 30th annual International Treasury Management Week.
I’m grateful to Daniel Franklin, the Executive Editor of The Economist magazine, who has posed a series of thought-provoking questions to me, to help shape our discussion.
His eight major questions will help us focus on the broad contours of the global economy of the future, and on the trajectory of international finance in helping shape that future.
As we look ahead toward the world of 2040 — aiming to foresee how the economy, the financial sector, and society will take shape — Daniel’s first question asks us to discern the major factors that will shape the economy and society by mid-century.
Overall, many scholars and many policymakers have largely agreed that five key global forces will be pivotal in influencing the economy of the future:
• first, the growth of digital technologies;
• second, the importance of sustainability, especially in the context of climate change;
• third, the role of changing demographics;
• fourth, the complexity of geopolitics; and
• fifth, the inevitability of structural transformation.
Let me briefly outline the key features that will define each of these factors — and, throughout today’s discussion, we’ll come back to these key features, and we’ll explore them in greater depth.
First, in digital technologies: Technological developments — such as digitalization and automation — will play a major role in driving inclusive and long-term growth, will interact with demographic changes, and may reshape entire industries and sectors. In addition, the rise of digital assets and novel forms of financial intermediation — within and across borders — will also shape the international monetary system. That factor could fundamentally alter the global macro-financial landscape.