Thought leadership, sector briefings, and trend analysis from our global team of research experts.
When attacks return, Route Reversion Lag will reset its curves, not shrink its count: dropping threatened services would show a recovery no ship has made.
By Daniel Frost, Head of Supply-Chain Intelligence
Read moreAt 05:30 CEST on 21 September the Kaub gauge read 15 centimetres — far below every carrier's published low-water trigger, though not a new record. Because the surcharge ladder is administered and pre-published, the cost of Rhine access can be read off a public feed before any invoice arrives.
By Rebecca Osei, Head of Trade & Development Economics
Read moreThe WTO's flagship 2026 report shows the transparency that makes market-access rules predictable is eroding, even as most merchandise trade still moves on those terms. Firms should assess the reliability of the rules they source and invest under, not just the announced tariff level.
By Rebecca Osei, Head of Trade & Development Economics
Read moreAt the Strait of Hormuz, AIS-visible transits read roughly 5 per cent of their June-2023 reference while cargo-flow accounting to mid-August read near normal. Neither tells a shipper whether passage is securable — and neither justifies rerouting, force majeure or contract action on a first-print count.
By Lim Wei Sheng, Head of Maritime & Logistics Research
Read moreA record-strength El Niño comes with months of formal notice, yet markets are pricing it commodity by commodity: cocoa has repriced, palm oil only partially, and grain curves carry no weather premium. The window to triage 2027 exposures closes with Southern Hemisphere planting in October.
By Rebecca Osei, Head of Trade & Development Economics
Read moreMemory quotes that once held for 30 days now expire in as little as 72 hours, and buyers with long-term agreements pay capped prices while everyone else rides a compounding curve. Memory has become a strategic commodity — and fiscal-2027 budgets should treat it as one.
By Kenji Watanabe, Head of Advanced Manufacturing Research
Read moreSurvey response rates have collapsed and statistical advisory committees are gone, yet benchmark revisions show no structural break. The live risk for planners is over-correction — abandoning audited official series for unaudited alternatives instead of governing triangulation.
By Diana Whitfield, Chief Economist
Read moreThe Busan deal's three legs — the BIS Affiliates Rule stay, China's strategic-minerals suspension and the tariff truce — converge on 9–10 November 2026. Reimposition is already written into the rules; it is renewal that requires action, and the window now sits inside ordinary lead times.
By Daniel Frost, Head of Supply-Chain Intelligence
Read moreReinsurance capital stands at a record US$800 billion and the post-2023 hard market is softening into 2027. Corporate risk buyers have a conditional 12-to-24-month window to restore the cover terms conceded in 2023 — if they negotiate structure, not just rate.
By Robert Tanaka, Head of Operations & Supply Chain Research
Read moreFrom 2 August 2026, the EU's AI transparency rules are enforceable — and their obligations are split across the supply chain. AI compliance is now a procurement discipline: capability without a transferable evidence trail is an unpurchasable product for EU-exposed use cases.
By James Holloway, Senior Technology Analyst
Read moreNominal goods trade is up roughly 12.5 per cent — but real volume growth is decelerating and goods-movement momentum is only modestly positive. Leaders who plan off the value print risk over-ordering, over-building and over-forecasting into a price-driven, narrowly based expansion.
By Diana Whitfield, Chief Economist
Read moreRefining concentration rose even as mining diversified. For governments and procurement leaders funding new mines, supply security now hinges on the midstream — refining, components, equipment and skills — where the chokepoints remain intact and hardest to replicate.
By Robert Tanaka, Head of Operations & Supply Chain Research
Read morePorts can buy cranes, berths and capacity almost anywhere, but not the ability to orchestrate the flows that pass through them — a capability the World Research Institute is developing a framework to measure, and the axis on which the next hub race will be fought.
By Lim Wei Sheng, Head of Maritime & Logistics Research
Read moreMonths after the Red Sea became transitable again, many eligible services still sail via the Cape of Good Hope — and the unmeasured gap between reopened capacity and restored commercial confidence is where cost, pricing power, and strategic signal now hide.
By Daniel Frost, Head of Supply-Chain Intelligence
Read moreWhen Panama Canal transit slots auctioned for reported peaks of roughly US$4 million — on the order of 100 times the normal reservation fee — the market published a dollar price for logistics reliability itself, a price the World Research Institute is developing a framework to measure.
By Rebecca Osei, Head of Trade & Development Economics
Read moreThe indices that rank national and corporate logistics performance measure how well goods move on a good day. They are far weaker at capturing what happens when a single maritime chokepoint seizes — and that blind spot, exposed sharply by Strait of Hormuz risk, is precisely where the most consequential supply-chain intelligence now lives.
By Daniel Frost, Head of Supply-Chain Intelligence
Read moreGovernments have poured capital into port automation, customs digitisation, and smart-logistics platforms — yet the performance gains diverge sharply between countries that spent comparable sums. The gap is not about technology; it is about the complementary conditions that decide whether digital investment converts into throughput, reliability, and cost.
By Rebecca Osei, Head of Trade & Development Economics
Read moreThe world's largest bunkering port is racing to supply fuels that barely existed as marine energy five years ago. Singapore's multi-fuel expansion is not an environmental gesture but a defence of hub competitiveness — and a template for how logistics gateways survive an energy transition they cannot control.
By Lim Wei Sheng, Head of Maritime & Logistics Research
Read moreA class of metabolic drugs, a wave of ageing science, and an unavoidable demographic shift have converged to turn longevity from an aspiration into an addressable market — one that reprices consumer demand, healthcare economics, insurance, and the very definition of the working life.
By Dr. Helena Brandt, Head of Consumer & Health Research
Read moreA competitor's org chart, hiring pattern, and attrition tell you what its press releases will not. As workforce data becomes richer and more machine-readable, talent intelligence has matured from an HR curiosity into one of the highest-signal, most under-exploited disciplines in competitive strategy.
By Priya Raman, Director of Talent Intelligence
Read moreThe intelligence that transformed knowledge work is now acquiring a body. As foundation models meet cheaper actuators and robot-specific training data, the question for industrial leaders is no longer whether machines can reason — it is whether they can reliably move, and which operations reprice when they can.
By Kenji Watanabe, Head of Advanced Manufacturing Research
Read moreAs the scarce input in AI shifts from chips to a firm, permitted megawatt, hyperscalers are bypassing the multi-year interconnection queue to build their own power plants, making the defining question no longer capacity but who pays for the shared grid they still lean on.
By Elena Sørensen, Head of Power & Grid Infrastructure Research
Read moreThe stay-or-leave debate has collapsed: China's domestic market has stopped growing while a hardening global tariff wall — now raised by emerging economies too — closes its export outlets, squeezing incumbents' China P&L from both ends and making a dual-book strategy mandatory rather than optional.
By Adrian Ho, Head of Asia-Pacific Research
Read moreThe floating-rate coupon that powered a decade of private-credit growth has inverted from yield feature to transmission mechanism of distress, and in 2026 the deferral tools that masked the strain are failing — turning a credit problem into a repricing of liquidity and valuation itself.
By Marcus Ellery, Head of Capital Markets Research
Read moreThe era of near-zero rates financed a generation of deficit expansion. With higher rates now structural rather than transitional, developed and emerging economies alike face a refinancing arithmetic that constrains fiscal room, reshapes capital markets, and re-prices sovereign risk in ways corporate planners cannot ignore.
By Diana Whitfield, Chief Economist
Read moreThe pandemic-era disruption narrative has faded, but the structural rewiring it triggered has not. Six years on, global supply chains have been permanently reconfigured around resilience, geographic diversification, and geopolitical risk — at a measurable and now-quantifiable cost premium that firms have accepted as the price of continuity.
By Robert Tanaka, Head of Operations & Supply Chain Research
Read moreMost organisations are structurally better at explaining disruption after it happens than at seeing it coming. The firms that consistently see change coming have built a specific, teachable capability — horizon scanning and weak-signal analysis — into their intelligence function. Here is how it works.
By Nadia Rahman, Director of Strategic Foresight
Read moreTwo and a half years into enterprise AI adoption at scale, the labour-market impact is no longer speculative. Junior knowledge work has compressed in absolute terms while senior compensation has accelerated — a labour-market bifurcation with material implications for talent strategy, succession planning, and corporate margin structure.
By Mark Henderson, Senior Labour Markets Analyst
Read moreSaudi Arabia's Vision 2030 has reached its midpoint and the UAE's Centennial 2071 framework keeps compounding. Four years from the headline deadline, the Gulf has delivered more genuine economic transformation than sceptics predicted — and exposed the gap between ambition and execution in flagship programmes.
By Reema Al-Sayed, Middle East & GCC Practice Lead
Read moreMost corporate M&A teams spend heavily on due diligence and integration, little on finding targets, and almost nothing on continuous market intelligence about the deal-flow universe. The acquirers who consistently win the deals worth winning have reversed that split.
By Elena Markov, Director of M&A Intelligence Practice
Read moreFour years after the CHIPS Act, the EU Chips Act, and their Asian counterparts, the global semiconductor map has been deliberately redrawn. The geographic capacity story is real — the cost story is more uncomfortable than policymakers anticipated.
By Hannah Park, Head of Technology Sector Research
Read moreMexican nearshoring at scale, Argentine stabilisation and Brazilian structural reform make the most credible regional growth case in two decades. The 2026–2030 window will reward investors who separate country stories from the generic regional narrative.
By Carlos Mendoza, Latin America Practice Lead
Read moreStablecoin transaction volumes now exceed Visa's annual settlement. Europe's MiCA rules are in full force, US federal frameworks have advanced materially, and tokenised traditional assets are moving from pilot to production. Corporate finance teams cannot remain spectators much longer.
By Aleksander Novak, Head of Digital Assets Research
Read moreThree years after generative AI entered enterprise CI workflows, the discipline has been quietly reshaped. The firms still relying on quarterly competitor decks are being out-cycled by those who have rebuilt their CI function around AI agents.
By Tomas Bjork, Director of Competitive Intelligence
Read moreWestern defence budgets have moved from pledges to spending. Private venture capital is being redirected into dual-use technology alongside them. Together they are driving a structural industrial cycle with real consequences for corporate strategy well beyond the big defence contractors.
By Sofia Lindgren, Senior Defence Sector Analyst
Read moreIndia crossed $5 trillion in GDP and continues to add roughly $400 billion annually. Beneath the macro story, three structural enablers — digital infrastructure, formalisation, and middle-class expansion — are reshaping the consumer addressable market in ways global firms have systematically underestimated.
By Vikram Iyer, India Practice Lead
Read moreGenerative AI's promise has matured into something more consequential: autonomous agents executing multi-step business processes. We examine where enterprise adoption actually stands, what's working, and what remains hype.
By James Holloway, Senior Technology Analyst
Read moreWith a median age of 19, accelerating regional trade integration, and emerging payment infrastructure, Africa represents the most under-mapped major growth market for the rest of the decade.
By Adaeze Okafor, Africa Practice Lead
Read moreClean-energy investment will pass $2 trillion in 2026, more than annual capital spending on oil and gas. The question for corporate strategists is no longer whether the transition happens, but where value is being created and destroyed, and how fast.
By Mateo Restrepo, Head of Energy & Climate Research
Read moreFive forces will shape global business in 2025: AI in the supply chain, reviving emerging-market demand, a narrowing green premium, fragmenting trade blocs and data as a competitive asset. We set out what each means for decision-makers.
By World Research Institute Editorial Team
Read moreASEAN represents one of the most compelling market entry opportunities of the decade. This guide covers the strategic, regulatory, and cultural dimensions that determine success.
By Dr. Priya Nair, Senior Research Analyst
Read moreMost organisations track competitors reactively. Here's how leading firms build systematic competitive intelligence programmes that drive proactive strategy.
By Marcus Webb, Head of CI Practice
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