The neutralinterest rate (r-star) is an important input in monetary policy discussions and is commonly used to assess the stance of monetary policy. This Economic Commentary presents estimates of the neutralinterest rate from a recently developed model and provides a high-level description of this new model. With data through 2025:Q2, the model estimates the implied (medium-run) nominal neutralinterest rate to be 3.7 percent, with a 68 percent coverage band ranging from 2.9 percent to 4.5 percent. Given that the effective nominal federal funds rate is currently in the range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent, this model estimates with a high level of certainty (77 percent probability) that the policy stance is in restrictive territory.
“Oh that. We just took some undergraduate history students on board as interns. They provided the content and it was done.”
The co-founder of a digital heritage initiative promoting interactiveuser interfaces offered these opening remarks. Speaking at a Delhi-based museum, he had been asked about the information provided to users as they moved their hands across an interactive board, revealing images and narratives relating to the Indian freedom movement. His response clarified that the physical and digital components of such installations—for example, the 3D-modelingsoftware and hardware, scanning equipment and its resolution and the user interface—were more carefully designed and calibrated than the content they provided.
Contemporary cultural heritage (CH) is rife with digital innovation. The COVID pandemic accelerated this transformation as archivists and curators worked to develop content that would reach remote, locked-down audiences. Within significant limits, digital platforms can democratize and facilitate access to materials previously inaccessible. Instead of being physically siloed, digitized material—as data components and not just content on culture—can be reproduced, combined, and circulated infinitely to achieve a reach previously considered impossible. Accessibility and malleability remain one of the great boons of digital formats. But here, we consider the information economy of CH practice as it exists—and not its extraordinary and often hypothetical potential—in two, overlapping realms of digitized CH: for-profit business enterprises and academic side-hustles, related to more mainstream academic research.
In the former, questions of what is shared are often less significant than the appeal of the format. In the latter, innovation is often the result of short-term projects that languish, abandoned after project completion, and rarely find audiences. Our research builds on our individual experiences and the findings of a scoping exercise examining a number of India-based heritage projects conducted in 2021-22. It suggests the need for more careful consideration of the implications of transforming CH materials into forms of data; the change impacts everything from how we understand “originality” to the reliance on for-profit services to deliver heritage material to the public.
As digitized representations of CH and access to such formats become more widespread, are we, as CH practitioners and academics, giving enough thought to how digital technologies are reshaping the nature of CH and its audience? Beyond questions of wider reach, are we sufficiently acknowledging how these changes challenge a continued focus on originality and notions of academy as primary controllers of access to knowledge and its validity, both in research and practice?
Digitizing for Dissemination
In 2019, one of us—Deborah Sutton—developed a software platform, Safarnama, including an app and authored experiences around Delhi’s CH. The project subsequently extended to Karachi. Generating “original” content, such as audio-visual clips and old photos, to be hosted on the app platform, was key to its attractiveness and usefulness, but permissions proved tricky. Some collaborators who were initially keen to contribute content quietly withdrew, likely due to the unfamiliar format and unknown reach. The app format also raised other questions. Would incorporating content from non-digital but publishedscholarship require authorial permission or only acknowledgement?
In 2020, Krupa Rajangam held a sponsored incubation at the NSRCEL, a business incubator located at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, to develop a web interface that would host geo-locationed stories of marginalized histories by drawing on both historical facts and lived experiences. Corporate mentors remained skeptical of her ability to source “original” content on an ongoing basis, i.e., content that was both authenticated and validated. They repeatedly advised her to focus on the format, user experience, and appeal for “mass markets” so her prototype would find audiences. Both projects equally raised questions over who would consume the content and what constitutes the public or audience.
Our exploratory surveys firmly established the divergence in interpreting both CH and digital technologies, which was not surprising. Some projects defined and treated CH as fixed pre-existing material, to be interpreted and presented to audiences through digital technologies. Others re-framed digital formats of CH as components of data, assembling, manipulating, and representing extant archival and other materials. The rest generated digitizedCH, effectively altering its nature. Typically, such projects dealt with more ephemeral or less conventional forms of CH.
Fundamental Transformations
Notions of originality remain central to art, architectural and art historical training, and CH practice. Digitization transforms the access and retrieval value of “original” material in physical archives, such as old maps and letters, much lauded in traditional “analog” scholarship, to use value as data. Once the end-user (audience) accesses this data (whether historical facts or stories), it becomes nothing more than bytes occupying valuable space, to be deleted once consumed rather than stored, making it easy to overlook or disregard the source and its context.
For example, in the Safarnama project, the app contained carefully collected and authenticated narratives on “partition memories” in Delhi and Karachi. However, the bite-sized media format meant that users would only explore content once, as snippets. This realization led the team to develop the software and incorporate the ability to download content, which at least meant that users could collect, organize and store (archive) the assembled media.
Digitization also takes away the materiality of the archive, making it more ephemeral. Non-digital materials through, and into which we render CH can (in endless combinations and cycles) be lost, forgotten, sold, recovered, collected, displayed, and stored. Such capacities of digital files are obvious, but maintaining access depends on varied and dynamic software ecologies for existence and sustained end-user access. Digital files created within one software-architecture can be incompatible with, and therefore rendered obsolete, by another. The ethos of software development is constant change.
In another paper, we examined questions of quantity, quality, and reusability of data related to digitization of building-crafts knowledge alongside CARE and FAIR principles of data management. The principles were proposed and adopted by an international consortium of scholars and industry, the former focused on responsible collection, use, and dissemination of data, especially related to vulnerable people and the latter on sustainable data management.
As an example, one AHRC project experimented with methods to capture detailed 3D images of heritage sites and structures in dynamic crowded environments. They used one set of methods to capture the interiors and another for the exteriors, hoping to merge both together and develop holistic imagery for audiences. This proved impossible at first due to issues of software compatibility. Once that was partially resolved, the new software couldn’t handle the sheer volume of data captured—and it was unclear where and for how long such volumes of data would be stored.
New realms of intellectual property remain fuzzy. While the content on digital platforms is governed by licensing and proprietary legal frameworks, it is often hosted on open platforms, through web repositories such as GitHub. Prima facie, such openness appears to challenge the proprietorial nature of archives and other repositories as keepers of knowledge. However, it raises a host of questions about how to maintain a critical understanding of archives.
Digitization may, and should, transform access but should it obliterate the regimes through which the materials were generated and organized and what’s included or excluded? For example, a local coordinator of one project that engaged with artists commented that digital technologies are typically used to document technical skills as forms of intangible heritage and develop artistencyclopedias, saying that “they are hardly used to interrogate the reality that many ‘traditional’ artists hail from marginalizedcastes.” Similarly, the local coordinator of another project that engaged with communities living in and around a protected heritage site commented on how digital technologies often end up being used to create a record of heritage structures without any reference to their day-to-day setting.
Any and all digital enterprise in CH, we argue, needs to integrate the ambition to use digital methods to not just present but also counter and interrogate the material, its creation, and purpose. Digital platforms and web- and app-based software are now able to manipulate and re-situate information in unprecedented ways. The novelty of such formats can displace original, provocative, and timely considerations of the material. Often, we are so taken by the visual and structural attributes of these formats, that we accept it at face value and lose sight of the tone and content of heritage as a curated message about the past and the present.
Alongside this, digital augmentations and iterations of CH, including storage, have significant financial and infrastructural implications. The creation and maintenance of digital platforms requires either developing “in-house” digital specialization or, more commonly, reliance on private, for-profit platforms. Paying for external provision introduces complexities. Funders, including the AHRC, struggle to devise guidance or policy in relation to software licensing. However, a persistent challenge to projects, and partnerships between academic and non-academic partners, is devising data and software strategies that subsist beyond the life of the funded-research project. Often, the adverse effects of the paucity of longer-term planning around IP issues, sustainability, and data archiving falls disproportionately on the non-academic stakeholder.
While digitization foregrounds the potential and promise of complete openness and equity, maybe this is lost in practice. Or digitization may merely mark the displacement of one set of ethics with another. There is a need for more careful consideration of the implications, complexities, and risks of taking CH materials out of boxes and off shelves and transforming and generating it into data files, which are, in turn, dependent on digital platforms to provide end-user access. However, the question remains of whether heritage-related disciplines are adequately prepared and willing to confront such new ways of working, which have begun to dislodge some of the privileges extant in current forms of research and practice.
Krupa Rajangam is nearing the end of her tenure as a Fulbright Fellow at the Historic Preservation Department, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Her permanent designation is Founder-Director, Saythu…linking people and heritage, a professional conservation collective based in Bangalore, India.
The great price revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries provided a powerful lever for the specifically capitalistic tendencies of seeking profit through cheapening production and lowering the price. This revolution is rightly ascribed to the continuous inflow of precious metals, in consequence of the great overseas discoveries. It lasted from the thirties of the 16th century down to the time of the Thirty Years’ War, but affected different branches of economic life in quite different ways. In the case of agricultural products an almost universal rise in price set in, making it possible for them to go over to production for the market. It was quite otherwise with the course of prices for industrial products. By and large these remained stable or rose in price relatively little, thus really falling, in comparison with the agricultural products. This relative decline was made possible only through a shift in technology and economics, and exerted a pressure in the direction of increasing profit by repeated cheapening of production. Thus the development did not follow the order that capitalism set in first and the decline in prices followed, but the reverse; first the prices fell relatively and then came capitalism.
Notice the last sentence above, Weber explicitly describes price revolutions exactly as Fischer argues.
In the history books we read, the emphasis is always on colorful personalities, inventions and other more theatrical events. This obviously omits the idea of phenomena like price revolutions. We cannot explain history merely by these personalities; we need to zoom out and view the larger picture.
Augustine, the chief author of Christianorthodoxy, wrote in The City of God, “there have been discovered and perfected, by the natural genius of man, innumerable arts and skills which minister not only to the necessities of life but also to human enjoyment.” Augustine recognized the “astonishing achievements” that had taken place in cloth-making, navigation, architecture, agriculture, ceramics, medicine, weaponry and fortification, animal husbandry, and food preparation; in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy; as well as in language, writing, music, theater, painting, and sculpture. But he emphasized again that “in saying this, of course, I am thinking only of the nature of the human mind as a glory of this mortal life, not of faith and the way of truth that leads to eternal life… And, remember, all these favors taken together are but the fragmentary solace allowed us in a life condemned to misery.”5
Note that Augustine wrote The City of God in 426 AD, meaning that even 1600 years ago, they had already made colossal advances. The prejudice that we have, given our scientific training, is utterly misleading. Rather than being blinded by Biblical explanations of how the world came to be, Augustine lauded these scientific advancements. We think of Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, rather than, “Let there be light.”
There are various levels of empirical and artisanal knowledge. In cooking, we rarely worry about molecules that make up ingredients. All these daily life pillars Augustine lists cannot be overlooked, even as we unlock the submicroscopic world of quantum mechanics.
B-422666.2 [archived PDF], Perimeter Security Partners, LLC—Costs, August 8, 2025
Perimeter Security Partners, LLC (PSP), a small business of Brentwood, Tennessee, requests that our Office recommend that it be reimbursed for the costs of filing and pursuing its protest challenging the issuance of a task order to Low Voltage Wiring, Ltd. (LVW), a small business of Colorado Springs, Colorado, under request for quotations (RFQ) No. W912DY-24-R-0008, issued by the Department of the Army, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), for preventative and corrective maintenance services for access control points at 19 Army installations in the northeast region of the United States. PSP argues that it should be reimbursed its protest costs because the agency unduly delayed taking corrective action in response to its clearly meritorious protest.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) requires that before a rule can take effect, an agency must submit the rule to both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as the Comptroller General. CRA adopts the definition of “rule” under APA but excludes certain categories of rules from coverage. We conclude that the 2025 Policy Statement is a rule for purposes of CRA because it meets the APA definition of a rule, and no CRA exception applies. Therefore, the Policy Statement is a rule subject to CRA’s submission requirements.
Following the inflationary surge from 2021 to 2023, which was touched off by supply chain constraints and shipping bottlenecks, we evaluate a new panel of own-firm price and unit cost growth expectations in the Atlanta Fed’s Survey of Business Uncertainty for signs that the anticipated impact from tariffs is broadening beyond directly affected firms. We find evidence for the potential of tariffs to touch off another bout of high inflation. First, firms that are directly exposed to tariffs have increased their year-ahead price growth expectations sharply (by 0.7 percentage points). Second, firms that are not directly exposed to tariffs but are operating in industries that are highly exposed to tariffs anticipate a moderately higher trajectory for year-ahead price growth (0.3 percentage points). Third, this broadening of overall price pressures—a key feature of the pandemic-era inflationary impulse—is only partially offset by lower price increases from tariff-exposed firms that are operating largely in industries not exposed to tariffs.
Key Findings
Firms, en masse, have increased their year-ahead price growth expectations since the end of 2024. This is especially true for firms directly exposed to tariffs.
We find evidence of a broadening out of the influence of tariffs beyond those directly exposed. Unexposed firms in exposed industries anticipate a moderately higher trajectory of year-ahead price growth.
The broadening of anticipated price growth is only partially offset by lower price growth expectations among tariff-exposed firms that are operating in largely unexposed industries.
Drewry Maritime Financial Research (DMFR), is the marketing name of Drewry Financial Research Services Ltd. DMFR, is an independent equity research service focused on the maritime industry. DMFR’s parent organisation, Drewry Shipping Consultants Holdings Limited was established more than 50 years ago and is now widely regarded as one of the leading independent sources of global industry analysis and insight. This in-depth industry knowledge is fully applied in our analysis of quoted maritime companies.
Although previous studies suggest anthropogenic forcing may influence extreme precipitationprobability, few have specifically investigated the human influence on moisture transport. Here, we leverage the 2023 record-breaking summer precipitation in Northern China (NC) to address this gap. Combining station observation with Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) model outputs, we demonstrate that the 2023-like heavy precipitation event was exacerbated by anthropogenic enhanced moisture transport. External forcing increased the probability of extreme southeasterly moisture transport by approximately 1.3 (90% confidence interval: 1.0–1.8) times. Moreover, the total anthropogenic forcing likely increased the probability of similar precipitation events at least 1.7 times (1.0–3.1), with both greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols contributing positively. As greenhouse gases concentrations rise and anthropogenic warming intensifies, the frequency of similar extreme precipitation events in NC is projected to increase further.
The extent of human influence on moisture transport and consequent heavy precipitation remains a critical research question. While anthropogenic contributions to precipitation extremes are increasingly recognized, studies specifically addressing human-induced changes in moisture transport remain limited. The record-breaking summer precipitation in Northern China (NC) during 2023 provides a salient case study. This extreme event was fueled by substantial moisture transport from the southeast into NC, driven by TyphoonsDoksuri and Khanun. Attribution analyses indicate that both greenhouse gas and anthropogenic aerosol emissions likely increased the probability of similar heavy precipitation events and associated moisture transport patterns. Such events are projected to become more frequent with continued anthropogenic warming. These findings demonstrate that human activities significantly influence moisture transport pathways and consequently modulate extreme precipitation occurrence in NC, deepening our understanding of the physical mechanisms underlying these events.
Stone fruit production in Australia is forecast to decline in marketing year (MY) 2025/26, primarily due to the Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM) projection of a wetter-than-average spring. If realized, these conditions are expected to negatively affect both yields and fruit quality. Cherry production is forecast to fall by ten percent, while peach and nectarine production is expected to drop by seven percent. Growing conditions to date have been favorable, with excellent winter chill hours supporting strong bud burst and production potential. However, the anticipated shift to wet spring weather is likely to undermine these early-season advantages. As a result, cherryexports are forecast to decrease by nine percent and peach and nectarineexports by seven percent. Imports, though starting from a low base, are projected to rise modestly in MY 2025/26.
Post projects exports of Chileancherries to grow significantly in the coming years, driven by strong international demand, particularly from China. Post estimates cherry production in marketing year (MY) 2024/25 to reach 730,000 metric tons (MT), a 6.7 increase over MY 2024/25. Chileancherryexports will increase by 7.2 percent reaching 670,000 MT. In MY 2024/25, Post estimates nectarine and peach production to total 205,000 MT, a 3.4 percent increase over MY 2024/25. Peach and nectarine exports will increase by 3.4 percent totaling 146,000 metric tons. This growth reflects the continued expansion of nectarine planting, which offsets the decline in fresh peach area planted.
China: Call for Domestic Comments on 30 National Food Safety Standards
On August 1, 2025, the Chinese government announced a public comment period for 30 national food safety standards, open until September 26, 2025, via the national standards management system. The standards have not yet been notified to the WTO. This report includes an unofficial translation of the announcement and the list of standards, and stakeholders are advised to review the regulations for potential market or regulatory impacts.
China: New CCP Regulation Expands Anti-Corruption and Frugality Measures
On May 18, 2025, the Chinese Communist Party and State Council issued a revised regulation on “Strict Economy and Opposing Waste by Party and Government Organs.” The regulation bans drinking alcohol at public receptions and events and discourages other forms of consumption that could be seen as extravagant. The FAS China offices are monitoring the potential impact on high-value U.S.agriculturalproducts.
China: Revised National Food Safety Standard for Paddy Rice Notified
On July 25, 2025, China notified a National Food Safety Standard for Paddy Rice to the WTO under G/TBT/N/CHN/2091. This national food safety standard includes mandatory requirements for quality, testing, inspection, packaging, and labeling of domestic and imported commercial paddy rice. This report provides an unofficial translation of the notified standard. Comments may be submitted to the China’s TBT National Notification and Enquiry Center at tbt@customs.gov.cn until August 24, 2025.
Japan’s fresh cherry production for the 2025/26 marketing year (MY) is projected to be 12,500 tons. This forecast is a result of production losses caused by high temperatures during the pollination period in the country’s largest cherry-producing region. While this represents an 8.7 percent increase compared to the previous year’s historically poor harvest, it is expected to be a low yield year with a 25 percent decrease from the average production year. Due to the poor domestic production, demand for U.S.cherries is expected to remain strong for the 2025/26 MY, continuing the trend from the previous year. For peach production in Japan, the absolute number of fruits is anticipated to be equivalent to the previous year; however, the total production volume by weight is forecasted to decrease by approximately 10 percent because of high temperatures and low rainfall during the critical fruit growing period.
Nicaragua’s peanutfarmers are expected to reduce harvested areas by at least five percent in marketing year (MY) 2025/26 in anticipation of lower prices due to increased Brazilianpeanut production. FASManagua expects farmers to be more rigorous in selecting production areas based on historical yields in MY 2025/26, excluding marginal lands with less fertile soil. Even with fluctuating marketprices and adjustments to planted areas, Nicaragua is expected to remain a stable peanut producer in the region, with exports of shelled peanuts exceeding 70,000 metric tons annually.
The railway is the most revolutionary instrumentality known to history, for economic life in general and not merely for commerce, but the railway was dependent on the age of iron; and it also like so many other things, was the plaything of princely and courtier interests.
Zooming out you may intuit that these narrow gauge explanations are inadequate but much better than nothing. We are faced with the problem of connecting railroads and the Iron Age to larger transformations from which these railroads were born.
Despite the brilliance of Watt’s engine, however, without the financial backing of Matthew Boulton, it might have been a failure.
If you read Watt and Boulton’s correspondence, Watt is always thinking locally, whereas Boulton is already talking about selling the invention globally. This is the ecosystem in which Weber’s economic observations reside.
Land transport also remained as before. The post produced no change; it merely forwarded letters and small packages, but did not concern itself with large scale production, which was decisive for economic life.
Only the roads underwent an extraordinary improvement, through the construction of turnpikes. In this the French government under Sully took the lead, while England leased the roads to private enterprisers who collected tolls for their use. The building of the turnpikes wrought a revolution in commercial life comparable to no other before the appearance of the railways. There is no comparison between the present density of road traffic and that of this period. In 1793, 70,000 horses went through the little town of Lüneburg while as late as 1846 only 40,000 were used in freight transport in all Germany. The costs of land carriage amounted to ten or twenty times the freight on the railways at a later time, and were three to four times as high as the charges for inland shipping at the same period. A half billion ton-kilometers was the highest figure for transportation for the movement on land in Germany, while in 1913, 67 billions were carried on the railroads.
Everything is connected to everything else, and without realizing this truth and sensing the underlying transformations, you cannot get a clear signal from history.
