A look back at 2025—and what’s in store for 2026—from the Global Economy and Development program

There was no shortage of challenges in 2025 as the world grappled with geopolitical turbulence, trade disruptions, rising debt vulnerability, and the impacts of climate change. But 2026 could be a year of opportunity, says Brahima S. Coulibaly, vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings.

From geopolitics to technology, the world is facing transformative change, with major implications for both global economic governance and national public policies. Analyzing these implications is currently a big part of research in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. In this context, my work during 2025 focused on two key issues.

The first issue is how multilateralism needs to be rethought, to build a multilateral system fit for today’s challenges and aligned with the new economic and geopolitical realities. The current conjuncture calls for a bold reimagination of multilateralism. A joint Brookings-Korea Development Institute research project examines the profound ways in which the context for global economic governance is shifting. It analyzes the implications for multilateralism, ranging from its broad architecture to specific governance challenges in key areas including international trade, global financial stability, artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies, and climate change. Initial findings of this research were presented at a conference recently held at Brookings. The research will be published next year in a book titled “Quo Vadis Multilateralism? International Cooperation in a Changing Global Order.” This work builds on research on the new global dynamics published in a book last year.

The second issue is the management of the labor market impacts of technological transformation. Research underway examines how societies have managed labor market and distributional challenges posed by past major technological transformations and what lessons can be drawn from that experience. It then looks ahead and analyzes how AI may affect work, rewards, and inequality and what new challenges may arise for public policy. Against the backdrop of history, the research addresses the question: Will this time be different in terms of the labor market impacts and the policy responses needed? The research will be published next year in a report titled “From Luddite Fears to AI Anxieties: Managing Transformative Technological Change.” This work also builds on a book published last year on harnessing technology for inclusive prosperity.

All of this research involves collaboration with a number of scholars both inside and outside Brookings. I would like to acknowledge their excellent contributions to our collective effort.

As 2025 comes to a close, I am proud to reflect on a year of meaningful progress, rigorous research, and deepened global engagement at the Africa Growth Initiative. Across the continent, a series of high-profile elections underscored the centrality of governance to Africa’s economic transformation. In this context, our State of Democracy in Africa project offered a timely and nuanced analysis of political trajectories in select African countries. By tracing how distinct regime pathways emerge, we provided actionable recommendations to strengthen democratic resilience and advance transparent, inclusive, and equitable growth.

This year also marked a major milestone in our work on sustainable development and global economic cooperation. We released a flagship report examining the prospects for a U.S.–Africa critical mineral supply chain. Drawing on extensive consultations with public, private, and multilateral actors, the report outlines how both U.S. and African governments can mobilize private capital to modernize Africa’s mining sector and unlock mutually beneficial trade and investment opportunities.

Our policy engagement efforts were equally vibrant. We launched a special edition of Foresight Africa: Top Priorities for Africa 2025–2030, spotlighting Africa’s progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. We also hosted the release of New Pathways to Job Creation and Development in Africa: The Promise of Industries Without Smokestacks, a synthesis of groundbreaking research on how service-led and agroprocessing industries can drive large-scale employment. We convened a roundtable with African central bank governors, a timely and strategic dialogue on monetary policy coordination and the future of digital finance in Africa. And we were honored to welcome His Excellency Prime Minister José Ulisses de Pina Correia e Silva of Cabo Verde for a rich discussion on economic resilience in small island states.

Beyond our publications, 2025 was a year of deep global engagement. I had the privilege of representing AGI at several high-level policy forums shaping Africa’s economic future, including the G20’s Think20 (T20), the U.S.–Africa Futures Summit, the African Economic Symposium, the UNECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, the AERC Annual Summit, the World Bank–IMF Annual Meetings, and the Canada-Africa Economic Forum. Across these platforms, AGI’s insights on entrepreneurship, digital innovation, governance, and inclusive growth helped inform global debates and strengthen partnerships. In addition, our scholars continued to shape global conversations with Landry Signé’s deepened understanding of technology, policy, and economic growth, and Belinda Archibong’s illuminated discussions on climate, inequality, and institutional reform.

As we look ahead to 2026, we are preparing to release Foresight Africa 2026, our flagship outlook on the continent’s priorities for the year to come. This edition is enriched by the insights of senior policymakers, private-sector leaders, foundation partners, civil society organizations, youth leaders, and scholars whose contributions strengthen our collective understanding of Africa’s development landscape. We enter the new year with renewed momentum and a shared commitment to advancing sound policy, improving development outcomes, and ensuring that African voices continue to shape global discourse.

2025 was a challenging year for Africa, but not without hope. Despite showing economic resilience and hosting the G20 Leadership Summit for the first time, financing constraints and debt vulnerability intensified, global tariff dynamics reshaped trade prospects, fragility and conflict persisted in several regions, and democratic backsliding raised serious concerns. Uncertainty surrounding the future of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and broader U.S.–Africa economic relations further underscored how fragile progress can be.

But these challenges have not erased Africa’s opportunities, far from it. Across technology, energy, critical minerals, human capital, and innovation, the continent holds extraordinary potential to create jobs, unlock growth, and reduce poverty. The enduring challenge is not a shortage of ideas, but closing the gap between policy ambition and effective implementation that delivers results for citizens, businesses, and governments.

A major contribution to advancing solution-oriented dialogue in 2025 was the release of Foresight Africa 2025–2030, the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s flagship publication. Bringing together heads of state, senior ministers, development bank presidents, business leaders, and leading thinkers, the report provided specific solutions to some of Africa’s most complex challenges. Its insights informed high-level policy discussions, including engagement with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and shaped debates on how Africa can better leverage global shifts to accelerate inclusive growth, including leveraging artificial intelligence.

Another major contribution is the publication of the new book “Realizing Africa’s Potential” (Brookings Institution Press, 2025), which placed the private sector at the center of Africa’s development trajectory. Launched on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos alongside the President of Botswana, the book quickly became part of global and national policy conversations, from U.S. congressional discussions and major policy forums to engagements with African governments, multilateral institutions, corporations, and academic communities, reinforcing reach across policy, practice, and scholarship. For example, Børge Brende, president and CEO of the World Economic Forum, said that “’Realizing Africa’s Potential’ comes at the perfect time to act as a compass and a catalyst for businesses, both established and emerging, to navigate African markets and find success in the world’s most promising region. Professor Landry Signé’s lifelong dedication to elevating Africa’s presence on the global stage and improving livelihoods shines through this book as he inspires business leaders and investors to be an active part in Africa’s economic transformation.”

Along with Vera Songwe and Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, we have been at the forefront of shaping the critical minerals dialogue between the United States and Africa, including through Leveraging U.S.–Africa Critical Minerals Opportunities: Strategies for Success. We have shared insights with leaders across U.S. executive and legislative bodies, as well as with private-sector stakeholders and counterparts across multiple African countries. U.S. leaders included representatives from Congress, the U.S. State Department, Department of Energy, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Development Finance Corporation. African leaders included the African Development Bank, African Union, and government representatives from Burundi, Zambia, and Morocco.

Along with Danielle Resnick, we co-led The State of Democracy in Africa: Pathways toward Resilience and Transformation research project, bringing together over a dozen scholars from across African countries to examine the drivers of divergent democratic trajectories and resilience, as well as the interventions needed to protect and consolidate democracy today. The analysis included in-depth country studies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, and Zimbabwe. The findings were well received, including by the Parliament of Ghana, as we engaged with leaders on the sideline of the report launch in November 2025.

These various themes were further amplified through one full season and three special series of the Brookings Foresight Africa Podcast in 2025. Featuring 48 distinguished voices, including a Nobel laureate in economics, the secretary-general of the African Continental Free Trade Area, , and senior World Bank leadership, the podcast delivered actionable insights on some of Africa’s most complex challenges. Notably, the podcast was embedded directly into global decisionmaking spaces, with special series, including the U.N. General Assembly and the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings, better bridging ideas and actions.

Looking ahead to 2026, trade and investment, commercial diplomacy, critical minerals, energy, AI and emerging technologies, AGOA, and development finance will remain central to U.S.–Africa relations and Africa’s global partnerships, priorities echoed in the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy. Building on “Realizing Africa’s Potential” and recent Brookings work on a new U.S.-Africa blueprint, forthcoming research we are co-leading with Pierre Nguimkeu will focus on mobilizing private capital at scale, including a major publication on unlocking U.S. private investment in Africa’s critical minerals value chains. Governance will also remain central, with new work focused on strengthening democratic resilience and accountability across the continent.

As 2025 draws to a close, we are taking a moment to reflect on a year of progress and partnership and to look ahead with optimism and purpose. Guided by our systems-oriented approach, we engaged with over 200 partners across 70 countries working to ensure inclusive, equitable, and contextually relevant learning for all young people.

The voices, experiences, and agency of young people remained central to developing solutions that impact their lives. The Center for Universal Education’s (CUE) symposium in April brought together diverse actors to share learnings and approaches around the “what” and “how” of engaging youth in research and policy to transform education systems. We explored the student disengagement gap in a report and the subsequent book The Disengaged Teen. Through collaborative, participatory, and intergenerational research, we worked on co-creating lessons on girls’ agency in marginalized contexts and on prioritizing student voice in education system decision making and transformation. And we worked to center the voices of young children in humanitarian crises through a series of case studies and events.   

CUE engaged deeply with actors that directly support young people. Our Millions Learning initiative focused on the potential of middle-tier education governance for scaling. As part of the Childhood Cost Data initiative, we worked with local entities to support the effective collection and analysis of cost data.

Through global networks, learning exchanges, and events, CUE brought together educators, researchers, policymakers, civil society leaders, and young people to reflect, build evidence, and develop tools to advance systems transformation in practice. The Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education dived deeper in forecasting risks and opportunities for generative AI. At the global symposium on family, school, and community engagement, education leaders from around the world shared insights on how they are using community-driven research to champion family-centered education systems. In a three-part series, members of the SPARKS Research Policy Collaboratives in Egypt, India, and Mexico discussed the role of local education ecosystems in enabling or hindering pedagogical reforms and how policies and curricula influence pedagogies in their local contexts. And in September, the Network for Education Systems Transformation published three country reports dedicated to understanding the dynamics of education systems transformation in local contexts.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are energized by what’s next. In January, CUE will launch pioneering research into AI and learning, exploring how emerging technologies intersect with young people’s development and equitable learning outcomes. In April, we will publish a field guide to collaborative research, bringing together key lessons for a more collective, inclusive, equitable, and responsive approach to education development gleaned from across the Knowing Doing Network (KDN). From April to September, CUE and partners from the KDN will co-host a Global Symposia on Collaborative Research and Action to Transform Education Systems, a series of five “around-the-world” convenings to be held across North America, Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

In sum, together with our partners, we look forward to continuing the work of reimagining and rebuilding education systems—grounded in evidence, shaped by collaboration, and centered on young people.

2025 has been a consequential year for the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD), marked by rapid shifts in the global policy landscape and a growing need for ideas that bridge rigorous analysis and practical solutions. Across research, convening, and public engagement, CSD scholars advanced actionable approaches to development challenges, spanning artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, fiscal innovation, climate and development finance, global economic governance, and rural prosperity in the United States.

A defining theme this year has been how societies govern complexity in a fragmented world. At the global level, CSD continued to shape discussions on climate finance and development system reform. Amar Bhattacharya served as co-chair of the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance and lead author of its fourth report, advancing the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to 1.3T and informing COP30 deliberations in Brazil. Homi Kharas contributed to high-level thinking on development finance, sovereign debt, and aid reform—from proposals for a sovereign borrowers’ club to analyses of how development finance institutions and fiscal space must evolve to meet today’s challenges. At the domestic level, George Ingram’s work on U.S. foreign assistance highlighted the risks of institutional disruption, including the erosion of aid transparency and implications for locally led development. Together, their work reinforced CSD’s leadership on the architecture of international development finance.

CSD also strengthened its leadership at the intersection of fiscal policy, gender equality, and climate change. In the fall, Caren Grown and colleagues launched “Innovations in public finance,” a major compendium outlining a new fiscal paradigm that integrates gender equality, climate adaptation, and care. This work positioned fiscal policy as a central lever for delivering inclusive social and environmental outcomes, and reinforced CSD’s role as a hub for forward-looking fiscal thinking.

Domestically, CSD expanded its engagement with the launch of America’s Rural Future: The Brookings-AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity, a bipartisan effort to advance practical, long-term solutions for rural communities. Co-chaired by former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and former Gov. Chris Sununu, and led on the research side by Tony Pipa alongside AEI’s Brent Orrell, the initiative combines rigorous analysis with on-site visits to inform a comprehensive national rural strategy. Pipa’s Reimagine Rural podcast, now in its fourth season, continues to elevate place-based approaches to economic development, infrastructure, energy, and civic renewal across rural America.

At the frontier of technology and governance, Jacob Taylor led a growing body of work on collective intelligence, human-AI collaboration, and digital public infrastructure. From “vibe teaming” to policy-oriented analyses of public AI and digital systems in fragile contexts, his research explored how humans and machines can strengthen institutional decisionmaking while safeguarding agency and rights. These ideas were further advanced through partnership with Co-Develop and through CSD’s flagship 17 Rooms initiative, which applied frontier technologies to challenges ranging from housing shortages to health financing.

Looking ahead to 2026, CSD will build on this momentum to translate frontier research into actionable solutions through partnerships and policy engagement. We are deeply grateful to our scholars, partners, and global network whose collaboration makes this work possible and drives our shared impact.

In 2025, U.S. politics hardened around a familiar story: that other countries were taking advantage of America, and immigrants at home were taking advantage of Americans—an argument used to justify extreme policies that reverberated globally while leaving core labor‑market problems unaddressed. Immigration, long a source of political friction, became a governing obsession. Mass deportations went from campaign rhetoric to a daily reality. Virtually all avenues of legal migration were closed off or reduced to a trickle. Migrants with pending asylum claims, with legal work authorization, and with U.S.-citizen spouses or children were detained and often expelled—in some cases sent to far-flung countries despite ongoing legal proceedings, due process concerns, or even orders against their removal. The administration defended these measures as necessary for public safety. They claimed that migrants were taking jobs that rightly belonged to Americans.

That story has not grown more credible, but it has fed upon real sources of economic unease—stoked by tariffs, geopolitical conflict, and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, an old question has resurfaced with new urgency: Will there be enough good jobs in the future, and who will get them? The narrative of immigration chaos was conscripted into political service, diverting anxiety about labor-market fragility toward an easy scapegoat. Migrants were not only crossing the border, the story went, they were crossing Americans off payrolls.

The problem with this story is not just that it is morally thin. It is analytically wrong.

The Workforce of the Future initiative is focused on separating what feels true from what is true—and reconnecting immigration policy with the realities of how labor markets actually function. Migration and work are deeply related, but not in the zero-sum way political rhetoric too often suggests. In 2025, our research sought to make that distinction clear and focus on what actually improves the job prospects and economic security for ordinary Americans.

In Managing Migration Under Pressure we examined the Biden administration’s response to the largest displacement of people in the Western Hemisphere’s recorded history. The findings challenged much conventional wisdom. Irregular migration did not fall because enforcement alone became harsher. It fell—by more than 80% in 2024—when enforcement was paired with credible, lawful alternatives and regional cooperation. Migrants responded to incentives. When legal pathways were a viable option—and consequences for irregular migration were real—behavior changed. The crisis also became a laboratory for policy innovation, and the lessons, including an honest assessment of what didn’t work, offer a pragmatic foundation for a future migration policy grounded in the national interest. This research also garnered attention in mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, contributing to broader conversations about global migration patterns and policy responses.

In a Washington Post op-ed responding to the proposed $100,000 fee on H1-B visas, I argue that restricting skilled immigration is often sold as protection for American workers but in practice operates as a tax on them. Firms that hire skilled immigrants do not replace U.S.-born workers; they expand. Innovation scales teams. Productivity creates demand. The real casualties of shutting down legal migration are not foreign engineers but domestic workers whose livelihoods depend on growing, competitive firms.

These dynamics are not unique to the United States. In Ecuador, for example, the integration of Venezuelan migrants—who are often young and skilled—has the potential to revitalize a stagnant economy. The International Monetary Fund estimates that full integration could add 0.25 percentage points to annual GDP growth. And our research indicates that regularized migrants actually help tackle crime rather than increase it. This reinforces the reality that migration, when managed well with evidence-based policy, can be an asset rather than a liability.

This brings us to the deeper and more urgent labor-market challenge—one that long predates any recent migration surge. For decades, the American workforce has been hollowed out. Middle-skill jobs have thinned, leaving a polarized economy of low-wage work and high-wage opportunity, with fewer ladders in between. The rapid advance of AI has intensified fears that the few remaining rungs may disappear.

In 2025, our work focused on the public infrastructure workers urgently need to navigate a changing economy. Quality data is a baseline. Without it, policymakers are hamstrung in their responses to shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic or the onset of generative AI. Our blog and report on What Works for Employment Records shows the U.S. lags peer countries in modernizing labor force data records of what people do, what skills they use, and how their careers evolve. Nationwide standardized records would also promote a more transparent and accountable education and training ecosystem to help workers navigate a fast-changing labor market. 

In the haze of poor data, the country’s adult education and upskilling systems face seismic changes. Nondegree credentials have exploded: Certificates, badges, and short-term programs promise pathways to employment and higher wages. Yet evidence about their value and effectiveness is limited. Using 157 million resumes and detailed credentials data, we ask a simple but overdue question: Which credentials genuinely pay off, for whom, and in what occupations? Our findings highlight the promise and the risks: carefully chosen, rigorous nondegree credentials can add value, but many do not, underscoring the need for quality assurance, transparency, and guidance in the rapidly evolving adult education system.

This is where migration and workforce policy converge most clearly. When workers lack transparent pathways to advancement, when skills systems fail to signal value, and when institutions do not help people translate effort into mobility, the political space fills with resentment. Migration becomes a proxy for every unaddressed grievance. The lie that “migrants are stealing our jobs” persists not because it is persuasive economics, but because it attaches itself to a real fear: that hard work no longer guarantees dignity or stability.

Our work in the coming year will go further to help cities and regions take control of their economic future and align their economic development strategies to their workforces—creating intentional, credible pathways to economic mobility. 

Failing to manage transitions—technological, demographic, economic—is costly. It erodes trust, fuels populism, and pits workers against one another. Getting this right is not ancillary to democracy; it is central to it. The task ahead is not to choose between borders and opportunity, or between foreign-born and native workers. It is to design systems that recognize how deeply those futures are intertwined—and to replace scapegoating with policy equal to the moment.

That, ultimately, is the work of the Workforce of the Future: to insist that evidence still matters, that complexity is not an excuse for cruelty, and that informed and bold policy can produce shared prosperity.