In three weeks, finance ministers, central bankers and investors from more than 180 countries will gather in Bangkok for the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, running from 12 to 18 October, with the plenary session on 16 October. It is the first time the meetings have come to the Thai capital since 1991, and the timing gives the host country an unusual vantage point on a difficult moment for the region.
Asia’s Tougher Path: Why the Next Wave of Growth Will Benefit Only a Select Few
The forecasts that delegates will be debating were mostly finished before the summer. They rest on a specific assumption: that the Strait of Hormuz would begin to reopen in mid-July and that conditions would be broadly back to normal by March 2027. That has not happened on schedule. Talks between Gulf states and Iran were postponed again this month, and market reports put Brent crude back above 100 dollars a barrel in the past week. The story of Asia’s emerging economies in 2026 is therefore less a story of a single slowdown than of a widening gap between countries.
The playbook that worked, and why it works less well now
South Korea, Taiwan and, later, China grew rich on a well-known sequence: cheap labour, export-oriented manufacturing, rising productivity, and a steady climb from low-value assembly to higher-value goods. That ladder is harder to climb today, for reasons that long predate the current crisis.
Factories built now absorb far fewer workers than those built in the 1980s, so manufacturing employment tends to peak at lower income levels than it once did. China’s scale and overcapacity in many mid-technology sectors crowd the field for newcomers. World trade no longer grows much faster than global output, so exporting is no longer a rising tide.
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South Korea, Taiwan, and later China, built their wealth through a familiar path: cheap labor, export-driven manufacturing, increasing productivity, and a gradual shift from low-value assembly to producing higher-value goods.
On top of that, several economies are ageing before they have become rich, which limits savings, labour supply and fiscal room. Thailand is the region’s clearest example, and the country’s long-term growth declinehas been driven by exactly these forces, compounded by household debt that is unusually high for a developing economy.
Moving from middle to high income is a matter of productivity, skills, competition and institutions rather than cheap labour and capital accumulation, and those are the slowest things to build. Every crisis that arrives on top of this is harder to absorb, because there is less room to manoeuvre.
Three forecasters, three pictures
The three main institutions published their latest assessments between June and July. Their headline figures differ, partly because they use different country groupings and weighting methods.
The IMF’s July update sees global growth of 3.0 percent this year and 3.4 percent in 2027, describing an economy pulled by two opposing forces: the negative supply shock of the Middle East war and a positive technology shock driven by artificial intelligence. It puts emerging and developing Asia at 5.0 percent in 2026 and 4.8 percent in 2027. The Asian Development Bank’s July outlook lowers its 2026 forecast for developing Asia and the Pacific to 4.9 percent, from 5.5 percent in 2025, and expects inflation to climb to 4.3 percent. The World Bank’s June assessment is the darkest of the three: East Asia and Pacific slows to 4.2 percent from 5.0 percent, or 4.4 percent excluding China.
At the country level, the numbers show how uneven the picture has become (GDP growth, 2026 and 2027):
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Economy
IMF (July)
ADB (July)
World Bank (June)
Vietnam
7.5 (2026)
7.2 / 7.0
6.8 / 7.1
Indonesia
5.0 / 5.1
5.2 / 5.2
5.0 / 5.2
Malaysia
4.7 / 4.3
4.6 / 4.5
4.4 / 4.4
Philippines
3.9 / 5.5
3.8 / 5.3
3.7 / 5.6
Thailand
1.9 / 2.2
1.8 / 2.0
1.7 / 2.1
China
4.6 / 4.1
4.6 / 4.5 (developing East Asia)
4.2 / 4.3
The spread between Vietnam at the top and Thailand at the bottom is wider than the gap between any two forecasters. That spread, more than any headline average, is the real news.
The shock of war: who bears the cost
The IMF describes the 2026 Middle East conflict’s effect on energy markets as a large supply disruption that was cushioned by inventories, emergency stock releases and weaker demand. The cushion is unevenly distributed. Since the war began, the IMF notes, retail gasoline prices have risen about 30 percent in emerging Asia, against roughly 15 percent in Latin America, and liquefied natural gas prices in Asia have climbed by about half.
For energy importers, the pain arrives through three channels. The first is inflation: the ADB has raised its 2026 inflation forecast for the Philippines by 1.9 points to 5.9 percent, and for Thailand by 1.6 points to 2.9 percent. The second is the fiscal bill. The ADB warns that higher fuel subsidy costs could worsen public finances across developing Asia, particularly where natural gas is subsidised, and argues for targeted help to vulnerable households rather than broad price support. The World Bank expects fiscal pressure to be especially acute for energy importers such as the Philippines and Thailand. The third is food. Higher energy prices feed into fertiliser costs, and a possible strong El Niño could reduce harvests and lift rice prices, with import-dependent, rice-heavy economies most exposed.
Net energy exporters see the opposite. Malaysia gains from better terms of trade, and the IMF also credits data-centre activity and the technology upturn for its 4.7 percent projection. The war has, in effect, created a new sorting mechanism: your position in the global energy balance now matters almost as much as your position in the manufacturing chain.
The AI dividend, and who collects it
The second force cuts the other way. According to the IMF, the four largest net exporters of AI-related hardware, namely Taiwan, Korea, Thailand and Malaysia, beat first-quarter expectations by an average of 4.4 percentage points at an annualised rate, while the rest of the world missed by 0.3 points. Korea’s economy grew at 7.5 percent, more than four times what the IMF had projected in April, powered by semiconductors and AI hardware exports.
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Southeast Asia is capturing part of this. The IMF raised its 2026 forecast for Vietnam by 0.4 points to 7.5 percent on the back of technology exports, and the World Bank notes that demand for AI-related products lifted industrial output and exports in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
But the same institutions caution that the benefits are narrow. The World Bank points out that the spread of AI across the wider economy remains limited and uneven, which creates challenges for productivity and job creation. The ADB’s special analysis this year finds that advanced economies are better placed to gain early from generative AI because of stronger digital infrastructure, skills and institutions, while developing Asia’s gains are smaller, though more persistent, and depend on closing readiness gaps in computing capacity, skills and data governance. The IMF also lists a correction in technology expectations among its downside risks, particularly for AI-exporting economies with concentrated equity markets.
The lesson is subtle. Being plugged into the AI hardware chain is now a bigger advantage than being an emerging market or a developed one, but it is an advantage with a concentration risk attached.
Thailand as the test case
No economy in the region illustrates both forces more clearly than Thailand, which is the weakest of the major ASEAN growers in every forecast above and also one of the four largest AI-hardware exporters.
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The export side of the story is real. In April, Thai exports rose 23.1 percent, and electronics jumped 64.6 percent, though imports climbed even faster and pushed the trade deficit to a record. On the investment side, Board of Investment applications rose 37 percent year on year to 43.6 billion dollars in the first half of 2026, with 33 billion dollars concentrated in digital infrastructure such as data centres and cloud services. Foreign direct investment surged 80 percent.
The domestic side is far weaker. The Bank of Thailand held its policy rate at 1.0 percent in June and lifted its 2026 growth forecast to 2.3 percent, but that figure includes government support, and the central bank estimates growth would be 1.8 percent without it. It expects inflation to peak at about 4.5 percent in late 2026, and it flagged household debt of around 86 percent of GDP as a brake on consumption once stimulus fades.
The government’s emergency decree to borrow 400 billion baht, described when first-quarter growth of 2.8 percent was announced, funds much of that support. Second-quarter growth then slowed to 1.9 percent year on year, according to figures reported in a recent TBN briefing, which also noted that a business-sector forecast for 2.1 to 2.5 percent growth this year comes with a warning that imported content limits how much of the export and investment boom reaches the domestic economy.
SCB EIC describes the pattern as a K-shaped recovery, which benefits large technology-linked businesses while lower- and middle-income households and small firms remain constrained by slow income growth and high debt. The authorities appear aware of the risk that investment volume does not translate into local value: the government has paused 166 data-centre projects while it tightens investment rules, and analysts increasingly frame the task ahead as converting foreign capital into local supply chains and skilled jobs. In April, the central bank warned that a prolonged closure of Hormuz could push growth far lower, and its scenario analysis showed how exposed an energy-importing economy remains.
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Thailand also carries a regional complication: the ADB says the prolonged closure of the Thai-Cambodian border is weighing on Cambodia’s outlook, cutting its 2026 forecast to 4.1 percent.
The rest of the field
Vietnam remains the region’s growth leader, with all three institutions between 6.8 and 7.5 percent this year. Its strength rests on manufacturing and technology exports and steady domestic demand, though the World Bank notes that inflation was already elevated there before the conflict.
Indonesia is the steadiest, with forecasts of 5.0 to 5.2 percent, supported by resilient domestic demand and state-led investment initiatives. Its currency and local-currency bond yields came under pressure when the conflict began, as did Thailand’s and the Philippines’.
The Philippines has the sharpest downgrade. The ADB cut its 2026 forecast to 3.8 percent from 4.4 percent on delayed investment and softer consumption, though all three institutions see a strong rebound to more than 5 percent in 2027.
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China is slowing rather than collapsing. Growth was stronger than expected in the first quarter, but momentum faded in April and May, and retail sales fell 0.6 percent year on year in May, the first decline since December 2022. The IMF projects 4.6 percent this year, the World Bank 4.2 percent. India, by the IMF’s fiscal-year measure, is at 6.4 percent, and the ADB has trimmed its forecast because energy prices squeeze real incomes.
What to watch
The first variable is Hormuz itself. The IMF’s baseline used a 2026 average oil price of about 89 dollars a barrel and about 79 dollars in 2027, based on market pricing in early June. Over the summer, Iran said the waterway would not reopen without concessions from Washington, and this month Oman postponed a scheduled Gulf-Iran meeting as Brent traded near 107 dollars. The US Energy Information Administration’s September outlook is somewhat more hopeful, expecting prices to average about 90 dollars in the second half of the year and fall to around 77 dollars by the second quarter of 2027 as shut-in Gulf production restarts. If prices stay elevated, the July forecasts for energy importers look too generous.
The second is trade policy. The ADB notes that after the US Supreme Court reversed some tariff measures, Washington is moving towards alternative legal tools, notably Section 301, and that developing Asia remains the region most exposed.
The third is the AI cycle. A sharp correction in technology valuations or capital spending would hit precisely the economies that have been outperforming.
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The fourth is the calendar. The IMF’s full World Economic Outlook will appear with the Annual Meetings in October, and the World Bank’s regional update usually follows in the autumn. Given the energy trajectory since July, the risk to the current numbers is to the downside.
Harder does not mean closed
It would be a mistake to read all of this as a story of decline. The region is still growing faster than almost any other, and the World Bank expects growth excluding China to recover to 4.9 percent in 2027 and 2028 as uncertainty fades and energy prices settle. Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia are proving that the path is still open for economies that combine domestic demand, a credible role in the supply chain and reasonable policy space.
What has changed is the price of admission. The old ladder rewarded cheap labour and openness. The current one rewards energy resilience, fiscal room, skills, and the ability to turn a technology boom into broad-based jobs and incomes. Economies that manage all of that will look very different in 2028 from those that cannot. In that sense, the Annual Meetings arrive at a good moment for Thailand: the most useful thing the host can show its guests is not the size of its investment pipeline, but how much of it stays in the country once the cranes and servers are in place.
Australian shares have had their strongest session since early August after lower-than-feared inflation figures tempered concerns of further imminent interest rate hikes.
Siena Hutchinson is the founder and creative director of Hutch & Co, a London branding and website design agency working with lifestyle and culture-led businesses. A fashion design graduate with a master’s in graphic design, she began working for herself at 21 and incorporated the agency in March 2022.
On 29 September 2026 she was the featured voice in a Talent Times debate on whether creator-founded brands should mirror the creators behind them, drawing on the agency’s work for Agende, the planner business founded by Isobel Lorna. She tells Business Matters why strategy sits at the start of every project, and why she wishes she had learned to let go sooner.
What do you currently do at Hutch & Co?
I am the founder and Creative Director of Hutch & Co., a branding and website design agency helping ambitious brands define who they are and how they show up.
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My role is quite varied, which is probably one of the things I love most about running an agency. I lead the creative direction and strategy across our projects, work closely with clients and oversee the wider direction of the business. We work across branding, websites and digital, predominantly with lifestyle and culture-led businesses.
As the agency has grown, my role has naturally started shifting too. I am learning to spend less time being the person doing everything and more time thinking about where the business is going, how we grow sustainably and what Hutch & Co. should look like in the future.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
I do not think there was ever one big moment where I decided, “I am going to start an agency.” It happened much more organically.
I have always been creative and studied Fashion Design before going on to do a Master’s in Graphic Design. I started working for myself at 21, initially taking on freelance design projects and running an online print shop. Over time, the freelance side grew, the projects became bigger and I realised I was much more interested in building brands as a whole than simply designing individual assets.
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Hutch & Co. really grew from that. I wanted to build the kind of creative agency I would want to work with: collaborative, commercially aware and genuinely invested in understanding the business behind the brand.
I have always been fascinated by the point where creativity and business meet, because beautiful design is important, but the best branding has a reason behind every decision.
How do you approach brands built around a creator?
When we work with creator-founded businesses at Hutch & Co., I always think about the brand beyond launch day. Should the brand simply look and feel like the creator behind it? Not entirely.
When we built the brand for Agende, Isobel Lorna’s planner business, we chose to give it an identity of its own rather than replicate her existing aesthetic. I believe in a middle ground, where the brand feels unmistakably connected to the creator but can stand on its own, separate from their personal social media presence.
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Who do you admire?
I am particularly drawn to people who have built businesses with a really strong point of view. Founders who understand that the brand itself can be just as valuable as the product or service they are selling.
I also admire people who are willing to build differently rather than automatically following the traditional blueprint of what a successful business is supposed to look like. Running my own business has made me realise there are so many different definitions of success. I am increasingly inspired by founders who create businesses that are commercially successful but also work for the life they actually want to live.
More broadly, I am constantly inspired by the people around me. Other founders, creatives and even our clients teach me a huge amount. When you work closely with people building businesses from scratch, you get a front-row seat to how differently people think, take risks and solve problems.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
I would have learned to let go sooner. For a long time, I thought being good at running a creative business meant being involved in absolutely everything. When your business starts with you, your skills and your reputation, handing any part of it to someone else can feel incredibly difficult.
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But there comes a point where being involved in every detail actually becomes the thing holding the business back. I probably would have put systems in place earlier, asked for help sooner and become more comfortable with the idea that someone else can do something differently to me without doing it badly.
What defines your way of doing business?
Clarity, collaboration and being genuinely invested in the businesses we work with.
One of the biggest things I have learned through branding companies is that design should not exist in isolation. Before we start thinking about a logo, typography or colour palette, I want to understand where the business is going, who it needs to speak to and what it needs to be known for.
That is why strategy sits at the beginning of everything we do at Hutch & Co. I want our clients to come away with more than a beautiful brand. I want them to understand their business more clearly and have something that can genuinely support where they want to go next.
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I also believe in making the process collaborative. Some of our services include live design sessions where clients are part of the process rather than disappearing for weeks and being presented with a finished answer. I think the strongest work happens when you combine our expertise with the founder’s knowledge of their own business.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Start before you feel ready.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about starting a business is that everyone else has some kind of master plan. I certainly did not. So much of building Hutch & Co. has been trying something, learning from it, changing it and trying again.
I would also tell people not to obsess over looking bigger or more established than they are. Particularly in the creative industries, there can be a temptation to make yourself look like a huge agency from day one. There is actually a huge advantage in being small. You can move quickly, build close relationships with clients and figure out what you want your business to become without carrying lots of overhead.
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And finally, learn about the business side as much as the thing you are selling. Being a great designer did not automatically make me good at pricing, sales, contracts, hiring, managing cash flow or leading a team. Those have all been skills I have had to learn along the way. In many ways, they are the skills that determine whether you can turn something you love doing into a sustainable business.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful tools in the search for treatments that slow or even reverse aging, with recent studies showing AI-designed drugs and proteins producing early signs of rejuvenation in patients and lab experiments.
But researchers caution that the science is still in its early stages. No therapy has yet been proven to extend healthy human lifespan, and experts say measurable changes in biological markers are not the same as adding years of healthy life.
Still, a string of developments over the past year has pushed the question of whether AI can help people live longer, healthier lives from science fiction toward the laboratory and the clinic.
AI-designed drug shows aging signal
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The most striking recent result came earlier this month from Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-listed biotech company that uses AI to discover drugs.
In an analysis published Sept. 7 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the company reported that its experimental drug rentosertib reduced patients’ predicted biological age as measured by six separate “aging clocks,” tools that estimate how old a person’s body appears based on chemical changes in the blood. Patients who received a placebo saw little change.
Rentosertib was developed to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare and deadly lung disease that is strongly associated with aging. Insilico used its AI platform to identify a protein called TNIK as a target linked to both fibrosis and aging biology, then used generative AI to design the drug.
The analysis drew on blood samples from 42 of the 71 patients enrolled in the drug’s mid-stage trial. The six aging clocks were developed independently by teams at Harvard Medical School, Oxford University, Peking University and Insilico.
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Alex Zhavoronkov, Insilico’s founder and co-CEO, said the potential economic impact of drugs that slow aging could be enormous.
“If you manage to add 3 years to everyone’s life, the drug should be able to significantly extend the healthy portion of life as well, translating into trillions of dollars in productivity and savings,” he said.
Rentosertib entered a late-stage trial for the lung disease in July, enrolling about 320 patients across 47 centers in China. That study is designed to test whether the drug works for pulmonary fibrosis, not whether it slows aging.
Redesigning the proteins of youth
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AI is also being used to re-engineer the biological machinery that scientists believe could rejuvenate cells.
In 2025, OpenAI and Retro Biosciences, a longevity startup backed by $180 million from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, reported that they had used a specialized AI model called GPT-4b micro to redesign the Yamanaka factors. Those proteins, whose discovery earned a Nobel Prize, can turn adult cells back into stem cells and have drawn intense interest for their potential to rejuvenate aging tissue.
OpenAI said it had “successfully leveraged GPT-4b micro to design novel and significantly enhanced variants of the Yamanaka factors.”
The AI-designed versions produced more than a 50-fold increase in the expression of stem cell reprogramming markers compared with the natural proteins in lab experiments. The companies also reported that cells treated with the redesigned proteins showed less DNA damage, a key hallmark of aging.
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The natural Yamanaka factors are notoriously inefficient, converting fewer than 1 in 1,000 cells. Retro Biosciences has said its goal is to add 10 years to healthy human lifespan.
The results remain at the laboratory stage, and further studies are needed to determine whether the redesigned proteins are safe and effective enough for preclinical and clinical testing.
How AI is changing aging research
Scientists say AI is transforming longevity research in several ways.
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Machine learning systems can analyze massive amounts of biological data, including genetic information, proteins, the microbiome, lifestyle habits and data from wearable devices, to detect early signs that a person is aging faster than expected, before disease appears, according to a review published in May in a medical journal.
AI is also powering the aging clocks themselves. Since the first deep-learning-based clocks were released in 2018, researchers have built increasingly sophisticated tools to estimate biological age from blood tests, images and other data.
Beyond diagnostics, AI is accelerating drug discovery by identifying new biological targets and designing molecules faster than traditional methods. Some researchers are working toward “digital twins,” detailed computer models of cells or even whole bodies that could be used to test anti-aging treatments virtually before they are tried in people.
Money pours into longevity
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The scientific progress has been accompanied by a surge of investment. Longevity startups using AI to develop therapies, including cell rejuvenation, drugs that clear aging cells and epigenetic reprogramming, have attracted billions of dollars from investors.
A growing number of “longevity clinics” also market AI-driven personalized anti-aging plans that combine genetic testing, blood work and continuous monitoring through wearable devices. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has become one of the most visible faces of the movement, reportedly spending about $2 million a year on his personal anti-aging program.
Reasons for caution
Despite the excitement, experts warn that major hurdles remain.
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The biggest question is whether reducing a person’s biological age as measured by an aging clock actually translates into longer, healthier lives. Aging clocks are relatively new, and scientists are still debating how accurately they reflect overall health.
Researchers have also pointed to broader concerns about AI in longevity medicine, including fragmented health data, unequal access to expensive preventive technologies, the risk of overmedicalizing normal aging, and questions about privacy and oversight.
Many of the most eye-catching results so far come from small studies, early-stage research or company-funded work that has not yet been independently replicated in large trials. Regulators also do not currently recognize aging itself as a disease, which complicates efforts to approve drugs specifically designed to treat it.
Consumers are advised to be skeptical of products or clinics promising to reverse aging, since few such claims are backed by rigorous clinical evidence.
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For now, scientists say the most proven ways to support healthy aging remain regular exercise, a balanced diet, adequate sleep, not smoking and managing chronic conditions.
But AI is expected to play a growing role in the coming years, from spotting early warning signs of age-related disease to designing drugs that target the biology of aging itself. Upcoming results from larger clinical trials, including the late-stage rentosertib study, will offer important tests of whether the promise of AI-driven longevity science can deliver real benefits for patients.
His practice is shaped not only by his legal experience, but also by an extensive background in finance that gives him a valuable perspective when family-law disputes involve complex financial questions.
A lifelong Delaware County resident, Stephen Ciarrocchi graduated with honors from Garnet Valley High School before attending Penn State University, where he studied finance and was accepted into the Schreyer Honors College. After graduation, he began his professional career with EY, one of the world’s Big Four accounting firms, gaining early experience analyzing detailed financial information.
That financial foundation would later become an important asset in his family-law practice. Divorce and support cases frequently require a close examination of income, business interests, assets, expenses, investments, and other financial records—often at a time when clients are already facing significant personal stress. In many cases, an opposing party may attempt to underreport income, transfer assets, or otherwise obscure the true financial picture, and a careful analysis of financial records can uncover inconsistencies or information that might otherwise go unnoticed. Ciarrocchi draws on his finance background to identify and analyze those issues while helping clients understand how the financial details may affect the broader legal case.
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After building his foundation in finance, Ciarrocchi turned his attention to law, earning his law degree from Temple University’s James E. Beasley School of Law. He went on to gain experience in private practice before ultimately founding Ciarrocchi Law in Delaware County.
Today, Ciarrocchi represents individuals throughout Delaware County, Pennsylvania facing divorce, custody, support and protection-from-abuse matters. His approach combines thorough legal preparation with an understanding that these cases extend far beyond the courtroom, often affecting a client’s finances, children, home, and everyday life.
For Ciarrocchi, effective representation also means making sure clients understand both the legal process and the practical consequences of the decisions before them. He believes clients are better positioned to make informed choices about their future when they understand not only what is happening in their case, but why it matters.
You started your professional career in finance. What originally drew you to that field?
I studied finance at Penn State because I was drawn to business and the analytical side of the field. I was fortunate to attend the Schreyer Honors College, and after graduation I began my career at EY, where I gained experience analyzing complex financial information and learned to approach problems in a methodical way.
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At the time, I had no idea how valuable those skills would later become in my legal career. Financial issues arise constantly in divorce and support matters, and my background in finance helps me understand the numbers, identify inconsistencies, and recognize when something may not add up. A careful review of financial records can sometimes uncover transfers, underreported income or other financial activity by an opposing party that may otherwise go unnoticed. That experience also helps me explain complicated financial information to clients in a clear, straightforward way so that they can better understand how those issued amy affect their case.
How does your finance experience help when you are handling a divorce?
Divorce can involve much more than simply deciding that a marriage is ending. There may be significant questions involving income, assets, debts, expenses, property, investments, businesses, and support. Clients are often faced with financial documents and records they have never had to analyze before, and understanding how those pieces fit together can be critical to determining the true financial picture. My background helps me work through those records, identify what is important, and understand how the financial information may affect the issues in the case.
What do you think clients often underestimate about divorce and support matters?
I think clients sometimes underestimate how much information may need to be reviewed before the full picture of a case becomes clear. Financial records can tell an important part of the story, but they have to be reviewed carefully. Clients understandably want answers quickly because these issues affect their everyday lives. My role is to help them understand what information matters, what the legal process entails, and which issues need to be addressed before decisions are made.
Custody cases involve very different concerns. How does your approach change?
Custody matters require a different approach because the focus is on the children and the practical realities of their everyday lives. As part of a blended family with four children, I understand personally how important a thoughtful and workable custodial schedule can be. Where children will live, how schedules will operate, and how major decisions will be made can have a significant impact on the entire family.
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These cases can also be highly emotional, so I try to keep the focus on the issues that truly need to be resolved and on arrangements that are practical for the children and the parents. My role is to help clients work through the immediate conflict while keeping sight of the longer-term decisions that will shape their family’s day-to-day life moving forward.
What role does communication play in family-law cases?
Communication is a major part of what I do. Clients are often navigating unfamiliar legal terminology and court procedures while also dealing with an extremely personal and stressful situation. I believe they should understand not only what is happening in their case, but why it matters and what comes next. Whether I am reviewing financial information in a support matter, preparing someone for a custody proceeding, or explaining the next steps in a divorce, I try to make the process as clear and understandable as possible so clients can make informed decisions about their case.
Your practice also handles protection from abuse matters. What makes those cases different?
Protection from abuse matters are different because they can move very quickly and often involve immediate concerns about safety, contact between the parties, children, and exclusive possession of the family home. The consequences can extend well beyond the courtroom and affect nearly every aspect of a person’s daily life, which makes careful preparation and a clear understanding of the circumstances especially important.
When children are included as protected parties in a PFA Order, the issue raised in that case can also impact custody proceedings, because the Court may consider the underlying allegations, findings and restrictions when determining what custody arrangement best protects the child’s safety and welfare.
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I have represented hundreds of clients in protection from abuse matters, including negotiating resolutions and litigating contested hearings. That experience has reinforced for me how important it is to understand exactly what happened, what the court is being asked to decide, and the practical consequences the outcome may have for everyone involved.
PFA cases can also cross into the criminal justice system. An alleged violation of a PFA order can result in indirect criminal contempt proceedings and, depending on the conduct involved, may also lead to separate criminal charges. Because my practice includes both family law and criminal defense, I am able to approach those situations with an understanding of both sides of the legal process.
What have you learned from working with people during difficult family transitions?
I have learned that no two families experience these situations in the same way. Two divorces might involve similar legal issues but completely different personal circumstances. The same is true with custody or support. You have to understand what is actually happening in that particular family rather than assuming that one approach will work for everyone. Listening is an important part of that. Before you can help someone work through a legal problem, you need to understand what the problem looks like from their perspective.
What has kept your career so closely connected to Delaware County?
This is home. I grew up here, attended Garnet Valley High School, and have spent much of my legal career working in Delaware County. My wife and I also live here with our four children. That connection matters to me because family law is very personal work. You are helping people in your own community navigate situations that can affect their homes, finances, children, and relationships.
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Practicing regularly in Delaware County also gives me an important familiarity with the people and procedures that shape these cases, including Judges, Hearing Officers and court staff. Day-to-day experience in the same court system helps you understand how different matters are typically approached, what particular Hearing Officers or Judges tend to focus on, and what issues may be especially important in any given courtroom. That local knowledge helps me give clients more practical advice about what to expect and how to best prepare for their case. My career has taken a different direction from where I started in finance, but Delaware County has remained constant throughout it.
Blazhevska’s job sits at the point where policy meets the public: taking global agreements and international priorities and helping turn them into language people outside diplomatic circles can actually follow. For anyone researching how the UN explains sustainable development to a general audience, her role is a useful case study in what that communication work looks like day to day.
From Skopje to the UN’s communications team
Blazhevska grew up in Yugoslavia, in what is now North Macedonia. She attended High School Josip Broz Tito in Skopje, then studied Economics at the Faculty of Economics in Skopje, part of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University. An economics degree is not the typical route into UN communications work, but it gave her a grounding in the kind of data and policy analysis that later shows up in how she approaches global development topics. Understanding how economies function, how resources move, and how policy decisions ripple outward is useful background for someone whose job involves explaining sustainability initiatives to a broad public.
By 2008, she had joined the UN Department of Global Communications, where she remains today. The department’s work touches on how the UN’s priorities, from peacekeeping to climate policy, reach journalists, member states, and ordinary readers. Blazhevska’s specific focus has settled around the Sustainable Development Goals, the 17-point framework the UN uses to organize global priorities like clean energy, gender equality, and climate action.
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Why the Sustainable Development Goals shape her focus
Ask Blazhevska what she cares about professionally and the answer tracks closely with specific SDGs: climate action, affordable and clean energy, quality education, gender equality, responsible consumption and production, life below water, sustainable cities, and peace. That is a wide list, but it is not random. It reflects the actual range of issues that cross a communications desk inside an organization built to coordinate global development work.
What makes this interesting from a market perspective is the scale of the audience. The SDGs are meant to be understood by governments, NGOs, students, and private citizens simultaneously. A communications professional working on this material has to write for all of those readers at once, without losing the underlying policy accuracy. That balancing act, between precision and plain language, is arguably the core skill in this corner of the communications industry.
A vegetarian diet as a lived example
Blazhevska has been a vegetarian since 1991, more than three decades, eating cheese, eggs, and yogurt but no meat or fish. She rarely frames it as advocacy. It reads more as a long-running personal habit that happens to intersect with themes she already writes about professionally, like responsible consumption. For someone who spends her working hours helping communicate sustainability goals to the public, a decades-long dietary choice is less a talking point than a quiet consistency between what she does at her desk and what she does at the table.
What her background says about the field
In contrast to policy officers who frequently make headlines, internal communications personnel within major international organizations seldom receive significant public attention. But the translation work, turning treaty language and goal frameworks into something a reporter or a student can use, is its own discipline. Blazhevska’s economics training gives her an analytical entry point into that work, and her multi-decade tenure at the UN gives her institutional memory that a newer hire would not have.
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Her interest in spirituality, centered on themes of peace, harmony, and unity across faiths, sits outside her formal job description but is not unrelated to it. Communicating around peace-focused SDG targets, for instance, benefits from someone who has spent real time thinking about what peace and cooperation actually require between people who see the world differently.
The bigger picture for sustainability communicators
Blazhevska’s career is a reminder that the SDGs do not communicate themselves. Someone has to sit between the policy documents and the public, deciding what gets said and how. That is unglamorous work, done inside an institution rather than a startup or a headline-grabbing nonprofit. But it is also work that shapes how millions of people encounter ideas like climate action or gender equality for the first time, one press release or public-facing document at a time.
Britain’s business community is bracing for months of uncertainty after Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first Labour conference speech in the top job to declare that Brexit “has done more harm than good,” opening the door to a future referendum on rejoining the European Union.
So all of a sudden the Communist Islamic Labour Party of Britain wants a democratic referendum. Why, they haven’t honoured the first one, so they can shove their communism where the sun doesn’t shine, and every Labour Communist MP with it.
Speaking to delegates in Liverpool, Burnham said a long-promised UK-EU summit — now expected before the end of the year after months of delay — would deliver “concrete steps” to help British industries still counting the cost of leaving the bloc. But he went further than any of his predecessors by refusing to rule out putting the question of EU membership itself to voters at the next general election.
For companies that have spent nearly a decade adjusting supply chains, customs paperwork and regulatory compliance to a post-Brexit Britain, the prospect of yet another fundamental shift in trading relations is likely to be met with a mixture of relief and dread. Manufacturers and exporters have long complained that leaving the EU’s customs union and single market added cost and friction to cross-border trade, while financial services firms have watched passporting rights and market access diminish year on year.
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Burnham’s spokesman confirmed that so-called “red lines” — the government’s current commitment to stay outside the customs union and single market — will hold until the next election. But he stopped short of denying that Labour could ultimately campaign on a manifesto pledge to rejoin, telling reporters: “We will put this on the ballot paper at the next election.”
That ambiguity is itself a significant economic signal. Markets and investors typically price in clarity, not open-ended constitutional questions, and the mere suggestion of a future rejoin campaign could complicate long-term investment decisions for businesses weighing whether to expand UK operations or relocate them closer to the continent.
The politics are far from settled. London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan remains the most senior Labour figure to openly back rejoining the EU outright, while other heavyweight ministers — including Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle — have instead pushed the more modest step of crossing the customs union red line, seen by many economists as a lower-risk route to easing trade barriers without reopening the single market question entirely.
Hamish Falconer, the minister of state for European relations, told a Tony Blair Institute event that Burnham wanted to move “further and faster” than his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer in rebuilding ties with Brussels, arguing that Brexit had “not been a success.” Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband echoed the sentiment, describing Europe as central to Britain’s economic and strategic future beyond mere “geography.”
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The renewed push builds on groundwork laid during Starmer’s premiership, when a routine five-year review of the 2020 UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement produced a promised “reset” of relations. That reset has so far delivered incremental gains rather than transformative change, and business groups have repeatedly pressed ministers to move faster on issues such as veterinary agreements, mutual recognition of professional qualifications, and youth mobility schemes that could ease labour shortages in hospitality and care sectors.
For now, the immediate economic consequence of Burnham’s speech may be less about policy and more about sentiment. Currency markets and the FTSE have shown limited immediate reaction, but analysts note that prolonged uncertainty over Britain’s European destination tends to weigh on sterling and dampen business investment — a pattern seen repeatedly since the 2016 referendum.
With the EU summit’s date still unconfirmed and Burnham promising to lay out “different options” for the country’s long-term relationship with the bloc once it takes place, businesses now face a familiar, uncomfortable position: waiting once again to see which way Westminster will jump on Europe, and what it will cost them either way.
Britain is putting up tens of thousands of new homes each year in places that could soon be impossible to insure, according to the head of the country’s largest insurer, who says the risk of flooding is rising so fast that current housebuilding plans no longer make sense.
Amanda Blanc, chief executive of Aviva, said 110,000 homes have been built in flood-risk areas over the past decade in England, and if the pattern continues, another 115,000 will follow over the next ten years. Speaking to the BBC’s Big Boss Interview podcast, she said the trend was hard to justify given what is already known about where the water goes.
“That doesn’t seem to me to make sense. We need to think about where those homes are being built,” Blanc said. “It’s very well known where these flooding areas are. Let’s think very carefully about homes that are being built.”
The warning lands at a moment when climate change is visibly reshaping Britain’s weather. Blanc pointed to this year’s unusually dry summer as a fresh example of the danger: parched ground sheds rainfall rather than absorbing it, making sudden downpours far more likely to trigger surface water flooding than in the past. “You’ve seen a very dry summer, and what happens if you then get heavy rain on very dry surfaces is you get more surface water flooding,” she said.
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The scale of the exposure is striking. The Environment Agency estimates that roughly 6.3 million homes and businesses in England are currently at risk of flooding, a figure it warns could climb to around 8 million — one in four properties — by the middle of the century as the climate crisis deepens. Aviva’s own research found that more than a quarter of new homes already carry some flood risk, and that one in seven will face medium to high risk by 2050. Nearly a third of homes built just last year are projected to be at some risk of flooding within 25 years.
The consequences of building on, matter for more than just the households whose living rooms end up underwater. Insurance, Blanc explained, works by pooling risk across people who face genuine uncertainty about whether disaster will strike. Once flooding becomes not a possibility but a near-certainty for a given property, that model breaks down. “When there is an inevitability, it makes it very difficult for it to be insured,” she said.
For homeowners, losing access to affordable cover is not a minor inconvenience. Properties that cannot be insured, or can only be insured at prohibitive cost, become far harder to mortgage or sell, potentially trapping owners in homes that lose much of their market value overnight. A Guardian investigation last year found that some towns could ultimately need to be abandoned altogether as climate breakdown renders large areas effectively uninsurable.
Blanc argued that better design could blunt some of the damage even where building continues near flood zones — measures like bricks fitted with self-closing air vents, stainless steel rather than wooden kitchen units, and electrical sockets placed higher up walls rather than near the floor. “You can do all sorts of different things to your property to make it more or less vulnerable to flood,” she said, while stressing that mitigation is no substitute for simply avoiding the riskiest sites in the first place.
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Recent history underscores her point. The Met Office has calculated that, given current levels of global warming, a repeat of the extraordinarily wet 2023-24 winter — which brought severe flooding to towns such as Retford in Nottinghamshire during Storm Babet — has shifted from a once-in-80-years event to a once-in-20-years one.
The government insists it is alert to the risk. A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said “a record amount of investment” had gone into protecting nearly 900,000 properties from flooding damage, and that new planning proposals would prevent housebuilding in at-risk areas as ministers pursue a target of 1.5 million new homes. Critics, including Blanc, will be watching closely to see whether that promise holds as pressure to hit housing targets intensifies.
Blanc used the same interview to press the government on a separate, more immediate financial concern: the risk of destabilising savers through pre-Budget speculation. With Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ successor John Healey due to deliver his first Budget on 28 October, Blanc urged ministers to avoid “kite flying” over possible changes to pensions, warning that uncertainty alone can drive people into costly, irreversible decisions.
She said Aviva, a major private pension provider, had seen withdrawal rates spike to 30 times normal levels in the run-up to recent Budgets as savers rushed to lock in tax-free lump sums before rules might change. “Once you take your tax-free lump sum out, you can’t put it back in,” she said, adding that any move to weaken the state pension triple lock would inevitably increase pressure on private pensions to fill the gap.
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Taken together, Blanc’s comments paint a picture of a country whose planning system and financial policymaking are struggling to keep pace with a changing climate and jittery markets alike. On flooding, her message was blunt: continuing to build where the water is heading isn’t just risky for future homeowners — it is, in her words, “dangerous.”
Any decision would need backing from scheme members
Peter Davison, Local Democracy Reporter
08:55, 30 Sep 2026
County Hall Trowbridge(Image: Local Democracy Reporting Service)
More than 90,000 members of Wiltshire Pension Fund could be consulted on whether their £3.8bn pot should cease investing in arms companies, though not until next year.
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Campaigner Alex Hall called on councillors to hold a formal vote on withdrawing investment from weapons manufacturers and to bring forward a planned survey of pension scheme members.
In a response considered by the Wiltshire Pension Fund Committee last week, officers said any decision to divest from aerospace and defence companies would need backing from scheme members.
A fund-wide survey is currently scheduled for early 2027.
Mr Hall argued that a number of local authorities and pension funds elsewhere in the UK had already moved towards divesting from arms companies or firms with links to Israel.
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He also drew parallels with Wiltshire Pension Fund’s existing policy of scaling back exposure to fossil fuel investments, contending that the same principles ought to be applied to defence companies.
His submission argued that the distinction between so-called “controversial weapons”, which are already excluded under the fund’s policies, and conventional weapons becomes blurred when conventional weapons are used against civilian populations.
He referenced the conflict in Gaza, arguing that the fund should reconsider its holdings in companies connected to the arms trade.
Officers noted that the committee had already carried out a detailed review of the fund’s exposure to aerospace and defence companies in November 2025.
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They said that any future ruling would need to consider fiduciary duties, legal and regulatory obligations, financial implications, practical implementation challenges and the views of both pension scheme members and employers.
Meanwhile, the committee’s responsible investment reports revealed the fund’s continued progress on climate-related investment policies.
Officers confirmed that the fund’s listed equity portfolios had been decarbonised by 57 per cent against a 2019 baseline, while a target to direct 30 per cent of assets towards sustainable investments had already been met.
The reports further confirmed that work on divesting from fossil fuel companies remains an integral part of the fund’s broader climate strategy, underlining the stark contrast between the fund’s established stance on fossil fuels and the ongoing debate surrounding investments in the defence sector.
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Wiltshire Pension Fund is the Local Government Pension Scheme administered by Wiltshire Council, serving more than 90,000 active workers, former employees and retirees.
Its 162 participating employers encompass Wiltshire Council, town and parish councils, schools and colleges, along with a variety of other public sector and community organisations.
Britain’s housing market is buckling under the weight of a distant war. Mortgage approvals fell to their lowest level in nearly three years in August, as the fallout from the conflict in Iran continues to ripple through household finances, pushing up borrowing costs and denting confidence among would-be buyers.
According to Bank of England figures released Tuesday, just 54,918 mortgages for new home purchases were approved in August — the weakest monthly total since December 2023 and a fresh signal that the housing market’s recovery has stalled. The seasonally adjusted data underscores how a geopolitical crisis thousands of miles away has translated into very real financial strain for people trying to buy a home in the UK.
The chain of cause and effect is straightforward, if unwelcome: since fighting broke out in Iran in late February, oil prices have surged, reigniting inflation fears and dashing hopes that the Bank of England would continue cutting interest rates. Lenders have responded by raising mortgage rates sharply, making home loans markedly more expensive at precisely the moment many households were hoping for relief.
Simon Gammon, managing partner at Knight Frank Finance, said the slowdown built steadily over the summer. “Buying activity weakened through the summer as rising energy prices pushed up borrowing costs,” he said, noting that lending to homebuyers fell 15% in August compared with the same month last year — a striking year-on-year decline that points to a market losing momentum rather than simply cooling seasonally.
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Remortgaging activity, too, is losing steam. Approvals for switching or renewing existing home loans dipped to roughly 34,000 in August, down slightly from 34,600 in July. That is a curious wrinkle: normally, a wave of borrowers coming off cheaper fixed-rate deals would be expected to shop around and refinance in large numbers. Instead, many appear to be holding back, perhaps hoping rates will ease before they commit, or resigned to accepting whatever their current lender offers rather than facing the market head-on.
The numbers behind the squeeze are stark. The Bank of England found that the “effective” interest rate on newly drawn mortgages rose to 4.60% in August, up from 4.45% in July — a jump in just one month that would have been unthinkable a year ago when rate cuts still seemed plausible. Separately, Moneyfacts, the financial data firm, reported that the average five-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 5.94%, its highest level since October 2023. Two-year fixed deals are similarly expensive, averaging 5.93%, the priciest since July 2024.
For everyday borrowers, those percentage-point shifts translate into hundreds of pounds a month in additional repayments — often the difference between a purchase going ahead and a buyer walking away from a deal altogether.
Katie Clinton, head of financial services advisory at KPMG UK, said the figures show affordability pressures are now the dominant force shaping the housing market. “A further fall in mortgage approvals in August points to affordability pressures continuing to weigh on housing demand, as the shocks from the Iran conflict push up both inflation and mortgage rates,” she said. She added that the drop in remortgaging suggests “refinancing demand softened, despite many borrowers reaching the end of existing fixed term rates” — a sign that households may be delaying decisions in the hope conditions improve, even as their existing cheap deals expire.
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The government has tried to counter the gloom with its newly announced “Your First Home” scheme, aimed at helping first-time buyers onto the property ladder. But economists are sceptical that a targeted support scheme can offset the broader drag from higher borrowing costs. Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, warned that the prospect of mortgage rates staying above 4.5% for most of 2027 would weigh far more heavily on the market than any government initiative. “Mortgage rates staying above 4.5% for most of 2027 would have a larger influence on activity than the government’s new scheme,” he said, in effect arguing that macroeconomic headwinds will overpower policy tailwinds.
The broader picture is one of a housing market caught between geopolitics and monetary policy, with ordinary buyers absorbing the consequences of decisions made in oil markets and central bank meeting rooms far removed from their own kitchen tables. Estate agents across England and Wales have already reported a discernible cooling in activity tied to the war, and earlier this year the Bank of England itself warned that the conflict could push up mortgage payments for an additional 1.3 million households as fixed-rate deals expire and borrowers are forced onto costlier new terms.
With inflation expectations still elevated and interest rate cuts looking increasingly unlikely in the near term, few analysts expect a quick turnaround. For now, the message from the data is unambiguous: as long as the war in Iran continues to unsettle energy markets, Britain’s mortgage market — and the millions of households who depend on it — will keep feeling the strain.
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