Where Things Are Headed.

A thousand snipers in the sky.

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1. Global government borrowing is expected to reach a record $12.3 trillion this year, as a rise in defense and other spending by major economies and higher interest rates combine to push up debt levels. The 3 per cent rise in sovereign bond issuance across 138 countries would take the total debt stock — which has been pushed higher by the global financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic and now the need for greater European defence spending — to a record $76.9 trillion, according to estimates by S&P Global Ratings. Big economies’ focus on fiscal policy to “deal with crisis after crisis continues, and the outcome is you do have a much more indebted sovereign picture”, said Roberto Sifon-Arevalo, global head of sovereigns at S&P. This had been compounded, he added, by a rise in debt-servicing costs, as bond yields have moved substantially higher since the end of central banks’ bond-buying programs. (Source: ft.com)

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2. More than half of adults and a third of children and young people worldwide will be overweight or obese by 2050, posing an “unparalleled threat” of early death, disease and enormous strain on healthcare systems, a report warns. Global failures in the response to the growing obesity crisis over the past three decades have led to a staggering increase in the numbers affected, according to the analysis published in the Lancet. There are now 2.11 billion adults aged 25 or above and 493 million children and young people aged five to 24 who are overweight or obese, the study shows. That is up from 731 million and 198 million respectively in 1990. Without urgent policy reform and action, the report says, more than half of those aged 25 or above worldwide (3.8 billion) and about a third of all children and young people (746 million) are forecast to be affected by 2050. The research predicts a particularly alarming rise (121%) in obesity among children and younger people, with the number predicted to be living with obesity predicted to hit 360 million by 2050. (Sources: theguardian.com, thelancet.com)

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3. China is now producing most of the basic research that could underpin future computing hardware, an analysis has found. If that work develops into commercial applications, the United States might soon find it impossible to use export controls to retain its competitive advantage in high-performance microchip design and production, the authors say. Although the study’s findings do not mean that China is currently leading this field, “arguably, it’s showing us where things are headed”, says Zachary Arnold, a lead analyst at the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO) at Georgetown University in Washington DC, which performed the analysis. The study, published on 3 March, finds that between 2018 and 2023, research papers on chip design and fabrication included authors affiliated with Chinese institutions more than twice as often as they did US ones. And it wasn’t just a matter of quantity: China also excelled when it came to highly cited papers. Chinese-affiliated authors co-authored 50% of papers that were in the top 10% most cited for their publication year. That compared with 22% for US-affiliated authors and 17% for those associated with European institutions. (Sources: nature.com, eto.tech)