World Press Freedom Day - 2025

                     For about two decades I have had this activism for better political education, for more democracy and development, for more respect for human rights and better justice. The freedom of speech and a press free and independent are two pillars of democracy and justice and we all must defend them. We can't tolerate censorship of any kind. But if there is systematic bullying on TV against vulnerable human rights defenders, justice must be demanded.  I have a YouTube channel, here is the link.   https://www.youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773/videos. Since the creation of this channel its visualization counter doesn't work, the same has been happening with the counter of this blog since its creation in 2010.   This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://www.un.org/en/observances/press-freedom-day. The second was published at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2025/772836/EPRS_ATA(2025)772836_EN.pdf

     The rapid growth and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing journalism, the media, and press freedom in big ways. While the principle of free, independent and pluralistic media remain crucial, AI's impact on information gathering, processing and dissemination is profound, presenting both innovative opportunities and serious challenges. AI can help support freedom of expression by making information easier to access, allowing more people to communicate across the world, and changing how information flows globally. At the same time, AI brings new risks. It can be used to spread false or misleading information, increase online hate speech, and support new types of censorship. Some actors use AI for mass surveillance of journalists and citizens, creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Big tech platforms use AI to filter and control what is seen, making them poweful gatekeepers of information. There are growing worries that AI may make global media too similar and push out smaller media outlets. AI can also help media organizations by automating tasks, making them more efficient. Generative AI tools reuse take away income from independent media and give it to tech platforms and AI companies. AI is playing a bigger role in elections, helping with fact-checking and fighting disinformation. It also gives tools to journalists and voters to support informed participation in democracy. But AI also creates risks. It can be used to make fake content, like deepfakes, which can damage trust in democratic systems. Addressing these challenges requires collaboration among goverments, media and civil society. The U.N. Global Digital Compact, says it's important to deal with problems caused by technology while still protecting people's privacy and freedom of expression. World Press Freedom Day 2025 focuses on how AI affects press freedom, the free flow of information, media independence,and the global goal of access to information and protecting freedoms. May 3rd acts as a reminder to governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom. It is also a day of reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics.                                                                                                                                                                              Digital technologies have now taken the world by storm. Newspaper sales continue to plummet, while the number of internet and social media users continue to rise. Internet intermediaries are now the gatekeepers of freedom of expression and information, influencing critically the way we receive. Governments around the world are resorting to internet shutdowns and other measures to silence online speech. Against this backdrop, 3 May remind us that freedom to seek, disseminate and receive information from different perspective on issues of public interest is a public good and vital to building healthy and pluralistic civic space in which democratic institutions and a healthy political debate can flourish. Without free and pluralistic media acting as public watchdog, citizens can't access the information they need to make sound political choice, and accountability is severely impaired. The media also offer citizens analysis of ongoing events, serve as a public forum in which different voices can be heard and interact with, and help citizens to understand an increasingly complex world. 3 May is also a day to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of a story, to defend media from attacks on their independence, and to assess the state of media freedom worldwide. The European Commission monitors risks to media freedom in the E.U. Member States in its annual rule of law report. Additionally, since 2014, the Media Pluralism Monitor project, has been publishing reports assessing weaknesses in the E.U. Member States media systems that could hinder media pluralism. The 2024 editions of these reports confirm a negative shift regarding the journalistic profession, owing to an increase in the number of online and offline threats to journalists combined with abusive legal threats. The European Parliament has been an outspoken advocate for freedom of information and the protection of journalists both within and outside the E.U.

Economic Outlook - A Critical Juncture Amid Policy Shifts

                         This book is divided in 3 chapters. The first is an overall analysis of the current economy of the world and the last part of this first chapter, a report about the impact of AI on energy demand. The second chapter is dedicated to the global economic implications of population aging. And the third chapter is a report about an analysis of the migration and refugees policies. Like I've shared on Facebook before, many articles and reports showing the benefits to the place that welcome refugees and migrants. And like I've said many times as a global human rights defender, to seek asylum is a human right enshrined in the U.D.H.R. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). For about two decades I have had this activism for better political education, for more democracy and development, for more respect for human rights and better justice,  I have a YouTube channel, here is the link.   https://www.youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773/videos. Since the creation of this channel its visualization counter doesn't work, the same has been happening with the counter of this blog since its creation in 2010. Never a human rights defender was so much harmed in so many ways and for so long time. This post is a summary of the book with the title above, published in April 2025   at https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2025/04/22/world-economic-outlook-april-2025

                         This April 2025 World Economic Outlook was put together under exceptional circumstances. The U.S. announced multiple waves of tariffs on major trading partners and critical sectors. The global economy is now characterized by a high degree of economic and financial integration. For this reason, we expect that the sharp increase in both tariffs and uncertainty will lead to a significant slowdown in global growth in the near term. These effects are magnified in the presence of modern complex global supply chains. Anticipating such disruptions we have revised down our projection for global trade growth by 1.5% this year, with a slight recovery for 2026. The global economy is a critical juncture. Signs of stabilization were emerging through much of 2024, after a prolonged and challenging period of multidecade highs, followed a gradual bumpy decline towards central bank targets. Labor markets normalized, with unemployment and vacancy rates returning to prepandemic levels. Growth hovered around 3% and global output came close to potential. However, major policy shifts are resetting the global trade system giving rise to uncertainty that is once again testing the resilience of the global economy. Migration and refugee policies have become a critical part of public policy in the context of an anemic growth outlook and growing demographic pressures. In addition to documenting rising legal migration and refugee flows and barriers, the report finds the following: 1) Beyond the better handling of large unexpected displacement shocks, international cooperation can help distribute the short-term costs of hosting refugees more evenly across countries, while alleviating the burden on individual economies. Such initiatives stand to benefit developing economies, which tend to lack fiscal space and absorptive capacity. 2) Improving integration of migrants and refugees to maximize gain for destination economies. A big share of refugees are more often absorbed into the informal economy. strengthening incentives to take up formal work can help these economies reap the benefits of these inflows. Migrants and refugees can generate economic gain that outweigh fiscal costs and even ease fiscal pressures if they are well integrated into the labor force. Refugees frequently struggle to join he labor force or find employment opportunities that fully utilize their skills. The benefits from their contributions are larger, notably in the long term.                                                   Below the GDP growth in 2024, from the highest growth to the smallest growth.  The first column is for countries in the American continent, and the other is for some countries in the rest of the world. As previously forecasted, Guyana had the highest GDP growth of the world last year. The same had happened in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Congratulations to our neighboring country.

GDP growth 2024 in PanAmerican countries                           Rest of the World

Guyana        43.6%                                                                      Ethiopia     8.1%          

Venezuela        5.3%                                                                      India        6.5%

Costa Rica         4.3%                                                               Philippines        5.7%

Paraguay         4.0%                                                                      China      5.0%                                  

Guatemala            3.7%                                                                Indonesia       5.0%

Honduras          3.6%                                                                      Spain        3.2%

Nicaragua         3.6%                                                                   Turkiye      3.2%                                      

Brazil              3.4%                                                                     Poland        2.9%

Peru              3.3%                                                                     Norway        2.1%

Uruguay          3.1%                                                                    Portugal     1.9%

Panama           2.9%                                                                    Ireland       1.2%

U.S.A.           2.8%                                                                         France     1.1%

Chile            2.6%                                                                            U.K.       1.1%

Colombia          1.7%                                                                    Italy       0.7% 

Canada           1.5%                                                                         Japan      0.1%

Mexico            1.5%                                                                       Germany      -0.2%

Bolivia             1.3%                                                                

Argentina            -1.7%                                                           

Ecuador            -2.0%                                                                     

                                                          

Crime and Violence in Latin America

                 Brazil should follow the example of the European and North America countries, where violent crimes are punished with a lot more rigor. The right to life must be more respected in Latin America. The first part of this book is dedicated to an economical analysis of Latin America with lots of infographics. If you want to read the whole book there are versions in Spanish and Portuguese on the World Bank webpage. The Latin Americans shouldn't miss the focus on development, education, peace, justice, democracy and human rights. For almost two decades I've been writing online about the importance of these issues for a better life to everyone here in our continent.  This post is a summary of the chapter two of the book with the incomplete title above, published in April of 2025 at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/151ce3ba-0caf-4aae-ae71-d68751b7a80b/content

                 The development challenges in Latin America are increasingly compounded by the expansion of crime in the region. The regions' news outlets document not only rising homicides rates but killings involving politicians; candidates for office assassinated, altering elections; businesses that must pay extortion fees to operate; and neighborhoods, cities and rural municipalities under criminal control. This chapter argues that crime is one of the region's most pressing problems and must be at the center of any conversation about development. While it is a problem present in many countries, in Latin America, crime tends to be more violent and it also flourishes through coercion and extortion; the capture of state institutions and sometimes with rules that limit individual freedoms, including the right to move, work, and vote freely. The impediments it poses to the region's development are myriad: uncertainty about property rights reduces and distorts investment; extortion and insecurity raise business costs and reduce competitiveness; unproductive public security expenses divert resources that could go into health, education or infrastructure, improving people's lives; victims of violence experience reductions in their capacity to accumulate human capital; communities living under crme rule see their basic freedoms compromised. The channels through which crime contributes to low productivity, low growth and poverty are countless.  Crime feeds on an absence of opportunities. In the medium and long term, the best public security policy is building more functional states that can offer better education systems and labor markets that work well and can offer quality jobs. Collecting "taxes" from businesses is a widespread practice of organized crime groups in the territories under their control. Extortion affects smaller businesses more than larger ones. A paradigmatic case is El Salvador, where MS-13 and Barrio 18 were involved in extortion throughout the country for decades. Approximately 79% of businesses, including high-end restaurants and shopping malls, paid extortion fees. The total cost of extortion in El Salvador was estimated at 16% of GDP in 2014. In Ecuador, extortion cases increased by more than 65% from 2022 to 2023. Criminal activity is made possible by the ability of criminal groups to manipulate state actors at the national and subnational levels through a perverse combination of coercion and bribes, and some cases control over electoral processes through campaign financing or elimination of candidates by murder or pressure to drop out. Organized crime has become a parallel power at the local level across parts of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador. Latin America has long been hobbled by mediocre annual average economic growth, low productivity and high numbers of people struggling to stay out of poverty. This report argues that the region will remain trapped in this poor equilibrium until it figures out how to contain the worst expressions of organized crime, including the violence it brings along. There are several channels through which organized crime trumps development: 1) Reducing and distorting private investment. 2) Diverting public resources towards unproductive uses. 3) Destroying human, physical and natural capital. 4) Weakening institutions and the quality of government. 5) Deepening inequalities. All these channels add up to significant costs, many of which are hard to quantify. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates direct human capital losses and public and private security expenses in Latin America in 2022 at 3.4% of GDP. Homicides are not the only manifestation of violence. However, the homicide rate is the most reliable comparable statistic of violence. By this measure, violence in Latin America is incomparable high. While accounting for approximately 9% of the global population, Latin America records one-third of all homicides. Moreover, the gap between the homicide rate in Latin America and the rest of the world has widened over the last 20 years. In the second decade of this century, the average homicide rate in Latin America was 8 times higher than the world's average. (23.9 versus 3.0). The Latin America average hides substantial variation across countries. The 2018-2022 average homicide rate vary from 49 homicides per 1,000 people in Jamaica and 38 in Honduras (at the top) to 5 in Argentina and 4 in Bolivia (at the bottom). Most non-LatinAmerica countries ranking among the top 50 by their criminality score have homicides rates under 10 per 100,000 people. The exceptions are Nigeria, South Africa, and South Sudan. In contrast, all Latin America countries in the same group, except Paraguay and Peru, have homicide rate exceeding 10 per 100,000 and seven have homicide rates exceeding 20 per 100,000 people. These figures suggest that organized crime is more lethal in Latin America than in most other places, prompting the question of what else in Latin America different. Latin America, by far, has the highest average levels of excess lethal violence, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa. Within Latin America countries, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Guatemala are the countries with more lethal violence. In contrast, countries like Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina report lower homicide rates relative to their general levels of crime. The available indicators of the effectiveness of criminal investigation and adjudication, from the World Justice Project, suggest that except for Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay, Latin American countries rank the lowest relative to countries in other world regions. The first indicator assesses the quality of criminal justice based on the perception and experience of whether perpetrators of crime are effectively apprehended and correctly charged. The second indicator measures whether perperators of crime are effectively prosecuted and punished and whether criminal judges and other judicial officers are competent and produce speedy decisions. It provides a closer assessment of impunity, confirming that this is a significant problem in the region. High levels of impunity for serious crimes are confirmed by most measures of criminal justice performance in those Latin America countries experiencing more violence. Indeed, the availability of appropriate criminal justice performance indicators can improve accountability and public trust while providing the correct incentives for strategic effectiveness. To improve criminal justice capacity, specifically in fighting organizing crime, authorities must turn to prioritization, which entails focusing resources on investigating and eliminating those crimes that are more harmful to society, such as homicidal violence, child abuse and extortion. The lack of reliable information about organized crime and the challenges of measuring it are immense. Indeed, part of the institutional weaknesses discussed in the previous section results from the lack of data. Thus, part of the problem is the absence of systematic official survey. This is despite security being identified as one of the top concerns of public opinion in poll studies.