Category: Research & Insights
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The Economic Costs of the AI Language Tax: How They Build Up, and Who Pays Them
Executive Summary AI models don’t treat all languages equally. AI breaks text into “tokens” for processing and billing (tokenization). Some languages, spoken by nearly 3 billion people, can require significantly more tokens for the same meaning. In some cases they may need several times more. These extra tokens and the cost they incur, are called…
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Shipping: A Volatile Era
The Shipping Industry’s Reality: Is Volatility the New Norm? Executive Summary This paper asks whether shipping has entered an era of volatility, not just a temporary rise in costs. The answer is yes. Shipping costs now have two layers: a floor that keeps rising for structural reasons that include fuel, insurance, compliance, security, capital costs.…
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AI’s Cultural Divide;
Are your Language and Culture Winning or Losing? Introduction: Reframing the linguistic & cultural divide The economic divide in AI access—rich versus poor, connected versus offline—is well documented. This paper identifies a second, deeper divide running underneath it: a linguistic and cultural gap that determines not whether populations can use AI, but how well it…
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Europe’s Costly Summer
What This Year’s Heat waves Reveal About the EU’s Economic Future Executive Summary The summer of 2026 has made clear that Europe’s heat crisis is a stark preview of a risk that had, until now, largely lived in long-range forecasts: climate is now a near –term macroeconomic force, not a future one. Disruption has hit…
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We would like to welcome you into our quiet corner of the world, where you leave behind you the rush of news articles, and scrolls of social media, and dive deep into the underlying economic forces shaping our world. We seek a calm analysis of international events, from different angles, in an honest, free, and…