Since the EU’s new Battery Regulation took effect in February 2023, battery manufacturers across the bloc have been navigating a complex landscape of compliance demands, technical challenges, and evolving market expectations. The regulation, ambitious in scope, aims to impose strict sustainability and transparency standards on the entire lifecycle of batteries, from raw material extraction through […]
Since its enactment in January 2021, the US Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act has reshaped not only the compliance expectations for foreign issuers in US capital markets but also, indirectly perhaps, the risk management frameworks of the US institutions investing in or doing business with them. While its primary thrust is to ensure that foreign […]
Efforts to spur the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are ubiquitous in economic policy. Whether through subsidized lending, tax incentives, or direct grants, governments and development agencies routinely invest in programs designed to accelerate SME performance, hoping that broader economic dynamism will follow. Yet, evaluating whether these efforts truly make a difference requires […]
The first wave of reports under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), submitted in June 2023, has drawn both praise and criticism in policy and financial circles. What’s striking—perhaps more than the content itself—is the diversity in the approaches large enterprises have taken, particularly in supply-chain disclosures. Some firms appear to have embraced the […]
The 2023 Farm Bill, a sprawling piece of legislation as ever, introduced a provision that has generated no small amount of discussion in agricultural circles and among supply-chain analysts. Specifically, it requires producers seeking crop subsidies to report the movement of their commodities through third-party handlers. While on the surface this may seem a modest […]
The rapid evolution of digital infrastructure has pushed cloud computing from a specialist niche into the core of global business operations. As organizations in every sector migrate to the cloud, policymakers and economists face a new challenge: how to measure, compare, and anticipate the growth of this still-maturing industry. The International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) […]
Canada’s conflict minerals reporting guidance, introduced in April 2022, has quietly but steadily shifted expectations for institutional investors operating in and around extractive industries. While much of the early discussion focused on producers and manufacturers—the more obvious targets of such regulation—it has become clear over the past year that institutional investors themselves now face a […]
The European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products, or EUDR as it’s now commonly called, was formally adopted in April 2023 following the draft agreement reached in November 2022. It represents, by most measures, one of the EU’s most ambitious regulatory efforts to curb deforestation linked to commodity imports. Palm oil, soy, beef, and cocoa are […]
Few areas of healthcare have changed as rapidly or as visibly as telemedicine. Once a peripheral offering, it has now moved toward the center of service delivery in many systems. For economists and policymakers trying to track its expansion, the challenge is not only the novelty of the model, but the limitations of the data […]
Since its passage in July 2022, the Financial CHOICE Act has subtly but unmistakably shifted the landscape for bond issuers in the United States. While the Act was, at first glance, positioned as part of a broader effort to streamline financial regulation and promote market stability, a closer reading—and certainly, its early implementation—reveals a notable […]
Discussions of the circular economy often lean toward the aspirational. It’s one thing to declare an ambition to move from waste to resource, quite another to quantify what is actually happening on the ground. The real challenge for policymakers, economists, and industry leaders is measurement: tracking not just intentions but material flows, and doing so […]
Since its launch in 2021, India’s National Green Hydrogen Mission has generated a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty across the clean-tech sector. The mission, designed to position India as a leading producer and exporter of green hydrogen, places heavy emphasis on building transparent, resilient supply chains for the technologies that underpin this emerging industry. Electrolyzer […]
The Environmental Protection Agency’s 2022 revisions to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) have brought a sharper, and arguably overdue, focus on the traceability of soybean oil used in biodiesel production. While the broad outlines of the RFS2, introduced back in 2018, were familiar to most stakeholders, these latest adjustments—particularly the call for explicit, documented traceability—are […]
The informal sector remains one of the most persistent—and elusive—features of many economies. Policymakers and analysts routinely debate its size, its contribution to livelihoods, and the best path to formalization. Yet the tools for measurement are often limited, particularly in contexts where economic activity escapes official registration. The International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) framework, typically […]
The 2022 enforcement data for the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) offered, if nothing else, a stark reminder that regulatory vigilance in timber supply chains is no longer theoretical. For wood product distributors and importers, the penalties imposed during the 2020–2022 period painted a picture that was, depending on one’s perspective, either overdue or somewhat harsh. […]
The Blue Food Labeling and Sustainability Act, introduced in the US Senate back in 2021, marked a curious yet inevitable evolution in food labeling policy. For years, various advocacy groups had lobbied for a way to help consumers distinguish between seafood sourced responsibly and that harvested in ways less kind to marine ecosystems. The bill, […]