The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) recent issue of Finance and Development for March highlighted the other side of the health pandemic. The virus that we dread helped accelerate the digital future and its good and bad consequences. The Fund drew global attention to its potential impact on poverty and inequality following the pandemic shock and the quality of public health response.

There were many detractors of former and now incoming President Donald Trump especially on his narrow economic nationalism, restrictive immigration policy, and, well, his...

GETTING to talk with anyone powerful for anything, even if only to ask for information (Are you free Tuesday?) is hard enough with social distancing and working from home. Gone is the casual bumping at the office corridor to casually invite for coffee.

It’s quite natural and understandable to be very pessimistic and depressed at this time. There seems to be no end to this pandemic and no coherent government plan to end it. Instead, we are seeing another surge, deadlier than the initial one. While I have friends who died in the first wave last year, I know of many more acquaintances and relatives who have recently gotten infected, a number of whom have died.

Agriculture has long been the backbone of civilizations, nations, and communes. Empires are built on the foundations of food security and access to livestock, poultry, and grains. Modern society would interpret this as the common foundation of developing nations whose industries rose from the shadows of farmers cultivating crops and livestock by developing the necessary value chains that fuel communities. From the Indus Valley to the Mekong Delta, the world would not have progressed the way it did if it weren’t for agriculture.

For decades, governments have relied on the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) as an anchor for assessing global conditions in both...