VoxDev reports that analysis across 3.4 million households in 73 countries reveals that survey data collectors systematically omit respondents who are disproportionately costly to interview, and that this endogenous sample selection biases fertility estimates upward by 5 to 10% on average due to the relative undersampling of unmarried women.
The World Bank reports that forty-four per cent of governments’ internal AI use consists of individual public servants using AI for ad hoc tasks, nearly two-thirds of governments report providing public servants with licences or official access to generative AI tools, and only 39 per cent have formal ministry-wide guidelines while another 38 per cent are still developing them.
PIIE reports that quality-adjusted AI production in the United States grew at over 2,000 per cent per year in 2024 and 2025, that treating the AI sector as a coherent economic entity yields preliminary estimates of nominal AI GDP at approximately $250 billion in 2025 growing at roughly 2,600 per cent per year in quality-adjusted real terms, and that national economic statistics accounts were not designed to track this kind of activity.
Mapping the Artificial Intelligence Divide in Africa: Infrastructure, Accessibility and Capacity reports that physical infrastructure for an AI economy on the continent lags, with only 38% internet penetration, poor broadband coverage and less than 1% of all data centres globally, but notes positive trends towards the emergence of local initiatives and grassroots movements such as startups and universities.
‘Next-Billion AI Index: The compass for AI utility and adoption in the global majority’ introduces the Next Billion AI Index (nexbax), a diagnostic framework treating economic viability, operational deployability, and governance alignment as co-equal determinants of AI utility in next-billion-user contexts.