If you feel like we’re living in a time of constant turmoil, a new Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index backs you up. It was 60 percent higher between July 2011 and August 2016 than the prior 14.5 years, and 22 percent higher than in 2008-2009, during the height of the global financial crisis.

Why? Steven Davis, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist who’s created the index, cites the European immigration crisis, concerns about China’s economic transition and the British referendum to exit the European Union. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and surging populism haven’t helped, either. Davis’ index is a GDP-weighted combination of economic uncertainty indexes from 16 countries that account for two-thirds of the world’s output. The national indexes are based how often select economic uncertainty-related terms crop up in a country’s newspaper articles.

(See "An Index of Global Economic Policy Uncertainty," available on the NBER website.)

Puzzling Over Productivity?

Dallas Fed economists think they have part of the answer: U.S. high-tech economic activity has concentrated in research and development, the so-called “upstream” part of the innovation process, rather than in actual assembly and sale. Because upstream tasks are naturally less productive, given that “upstream tasks are also burdened with the responsibility of discovering and producing those new technologies,” that change is causing measured productivity growth to slow.

(See "U.S. Productivity Growth Flowing Downstream," available at the Dallas Fed website.)

Central Bankers’ Brave New World

Even in countries that weren’t hard-hit by the economic crisis, central bankers have been reconsidering their mandates or implementing financial-stability related policy measures, based on a survey of central bankers and academic economists carried out by Princeton University economist and former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder and his co-authors. “We hypothesize that central banks in the future will have broader mandates, use macro-prudential tools more widely, and communicate more than before the crisis,” the authors write, despite the lack of consensus about how effective extraordinary measures have been.

Still, views aren’t uniform: “While many scholars typically support keeping most of the unconventional policies in central banks’ toolkits, central bank governors are considerably more skeptical.”

(See "Necessity as the Mother of Invention: Monetary Policy after the Crisis," available at the NBER website.)