The 2023 impact report on the EU Conflict Timber Regulation (EUTR), which has been in force since March 2013, offers valuable insights into the progress and remaining challenges of improving transparency across wood and paper product supply chains. Over the past decade, the regulation has served as the EU’s principal tool for preventing illegally harvested […]
The introduction of the US “Right to Repair” Act in August 2022 has sparked a significant shift in the practices of electronics manufacturers regarding the transparency of spare-parts availability. Although the proposed legislation has yet to be enacted at the federal level, its influence is already visible across various sectors. The Act aims to require […]
The business of fighting money laundering is defined as much by the need for structure as by the unpredictability of risk. For financial crime units and regulators, deciding where to look—who, exactly, to prioritize for checks and audits—has never been straightforward. There are only so many investigators and so much time, yet the diversity and […]
Australia’s Modern Slavery Act, enacted in 2018, established a mandatory reporting framework requiring large entities to disclose the steps they have taken to address modern slavery risks within their operations and supply chains. The publication of the first updates to the Modern Slavery Transparency Register in December 2023 marks a significant milestone in the evolution […]
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 […]