"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Where is the world heading? What choices need to be made to help humanity to thrive? These questions are more acute than ever in a context of growing inequalities, populism, social disorder, environmental challenges, and global health threats.The Future of the Global Order explores the six fundamental transformations ahead that will define the future of the world in the next three decades. Each chapter provides a unique and fact-based analysis of the situation at hand, reviews underlying uncertainties, and studies their inter-dependencies. As a tool to trigger debate, the book provides possible evolutions in global activity with four baseline scenarios, grasping the key issues which will shape the global order to 2050.Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the massive forces of global change at play and the key decisions facing the future of humanity and the world.

This is the first book to critically analyze the future of higher education systems in the four BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - and the USA, analyzing academic salaries, contracts and working conditions and how national policy will affect the academic profession in each context.

The Global Future of English Studiespresents a succinct, carefully documented assessment of the current state and future trajectory of English studies around the world. Compiles data on student enrollments, faculty hiring, and financing in English studies around the world including China, home to more English majors than the U.S. and U.K. combined Rejects prevailing narratives of contraction and decline that dominate histories of the discipline Stresses English studies' expansion within a rapidly expanding global academic apparatus, and the new challenges and opportunities such sudden and dispersive growth presents Essential reading for anyone interested in studying or teaching English in higher education

China’s new retail revolution will completely transform how the world thinks about retail and digital innovation. But is the world ready yet? In this book, the authors share an insider’s perspective on what is happening in China to reveal the future for global retail, and a clear framework to help you prepare. The book presents a number of real-world cases, based on interviews and first-hand consumer experience, to decode China’s retail revolution so that you can understand what is happening and why, and what it means for the rest of the world. Crucially, the book identifies five critical stages in the development of new retail that global retail executives need to grasp now: lifestyle commerce, Online-Merge-Offline retail, social retail, livestream retail and invisible retail. To help the industry get ready for this new, China-inspired paradigm in retail, the authors present a practical and simple framework – a ten-year strategic roadmap for global retail executives, which we call the “Beyond” the Value Chain Model. China’s new retail is not just about fashion, cosmetics, snacks, data-driven convenient stores and commercial live streaming. At a time when the world of retail is being upended, it offers inspirational lessons in innovation, purpose and agility for global executives across the entire retail spectrum.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come. Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world: • Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past. • The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases. • The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets. • A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species. • Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands. • There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide. From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right. Praise for The Future “Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg “In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review “Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly “Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian