I am truly convinced that sustainable well-being growth can be achieved through: political stability, efficient allocation of resources and disruptive innovation.

• Political stability has the ability to enhance social cohesion which is the corner stone of cooperation and social collaboration. Without political stability, no agreements could be achieved.

• A regulated market, composed by a set of covenants, is a great mechanism to generate competition, align incentives and assign resources to the most productive activities that bring out the highest value for society. Of course, a regulated market will not be able to allocate resources efficiently if political stability is absent in a society.

• Finally, disruptive innovation is the key constituent to tackle incumbents while pushing forward the production possibility frontier. The potential of innovation can only be achieved given a strong legal system that protects the creation of ideas and a clear mechanism to translate those novel ideas into a profitable output.

Therefore, in my view of the future, I am very interested to see how these elements will evolve and interact among each other in following decades. Given the radical changes that lie ahead, is extremely fascinating to think on the political economy that will govern two decades from now. In this sense, somehow evident, I believe that the coming decades will be governed by main 3 forces: artificial intelligence, climate change and urban re-organization. Each one of these forces will challenge every aspect of how societies organize, how markets operate and how knowledge is created.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is in its path to become a general purpose technology, pretty much as the electricity in the early years of the last century. Vital for every single step in the economic production chain and available at every single home. Just as electricity changed our society one hundred years ago, so will do AI. Transformations are already taking place at different levels. From big public infrastructure projects that allows AI to work smoothly (data collection, algorithm training and decision execution), to small daily details such as improving daily commutes routes (soon in autonomous vehicles) and AI led medical diagnosis. Not to mention the structural transformations in organizations (such as governments and business), who will have to go through their digital transformation in a mandatory way. Basically, every single node in an organization value chain will heavily rely in AI, from recruiting human talent to strategic planning and strategy execution.

• Climate change and the preservation of life on this planet are a long-standing problem. Most global leaders have been aware of this problem for decades, but political and economic intricate issues prevented them from taking a sharp decision on the matter, as the opportunity costs of not taking a decision used to be low. Now, however, we have already crossed a point of no return and the next decades will exhibit lower glaciers, lower salinity in the sea and increased volatility in meteorological phenomena. The latter would definitely rise the costs associated to not taking a decision, as many economic activities will be directly affected (mainly food and energy production) and push governments to take an active stance on the matter. I expect to see increased regulation in environmental matters, as well as government (mainly in China and in the EU) lead initiatives to incentivize the adoption of novel environment-friendly technologies in the following years.

• Urban re-organization. Centralized business office hubs and peripheral big shopping malls are a thing of the past. In the last century, cities were organize around getting to work and getting to consume, while promoting the car as the main mean of transportation. However, technological development and the impact of Covid19 showed us that we could do both things while staying closer to home. The future heads toward remote work with co-working office spaces, consumption in on-line and local shops and short distances commutes. In the next decades, there will be an increasing discussion and political pressures to re-shape how we live. With a big shift towards smart, sustainable, closer-to-home and community-based living spaces.

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