Opinion

  An apparent environmental disaster off Vietnam’s central coastal region, estimated by some as one of the country’s worst ever toxic spills, represents newly appointed Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s first big political test. How Phuc strikes a balance between foreign investor interests and local community rights in handling the case will set an early precedent for his government’s policy ...

Gigantic government’s complexity and opacity provide innumerable opportunities for opportunists to act unconstrained by clear law or effective supervision. Today’s example, involving the government’s expropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars, features three sets of unsympathetic actors — a grasping federal government, a few hedge funds nimble at exploiting the co-mingling of government and the private sector, and two anomalous ...

  The crackdown on smoking advertising is assuming a global trend. Many countries are moving gradually to tighten grip on smoking promotion to reduce tobacco-related deaths. The tobacco industry, which rakes in huge revenues and gives employment to lot many people, is lobbying hard to put brakes on an all-out war against tobacco even as governments move cautiously to address ...

  Cal Wong SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Amid the slowdown in the Hong Kong property market, Hong Kong’s overall tax revenue has fallen for the first time in six years. In total, the taxman collected HK$291.3 billion (US$37.5 billion), down HK$10.6 billion from the year before. Stamp duty takings on property transactions have plunged 16 percent in the 2015-16 fiscal ...

  On Tuesday night, the Australian federal government delivered its budget for the forthcoming Australian financial year (1 July 2016 – 20 June 2017). The budget contained no dramatic announcements or big concepts. With an election to be held on July 2, and current polls indicating an erosion of its favorability, the conservative coalition government felt an inability to propose ...

  The bookies and polls called it correctly. Londoners chose the son of Pakistani immigrants as their next mayor over the Eton-educated heir to a family fortune. Now it will be up to Mayor Sadiq Khan to fulfil his promise to address the greatest source of London’s growing inequality: the city’s housing crisis. London housing is both expensive and scarce. ...

  Leonid Bershidsky It is now widely accepted that technological advances, especially ones that make machines more like humans — such as robotization or artificial intelligence — are putting people out of work and will only destroy more jobs in the future. The wealth will accrue to those who own the machines, not to what’s known as the middle class ...

  Asit K. Biswas / Augustin Boey SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Corruption has probably existed since the dawn of human civilization. With a steadily increasing population, accelerating economic activities accelerating, and intensification of global inequalities, corruption has become increasingly commonplace and pervasive. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States of America, has observed: “Corruption, embezzlement ...

SARI RASH, Iraq This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that formed Iraq, Syria and the other fragile nations of the modern Middle East. The past few weeks have provided dramatic new evidence, if more were needed, that the old colonial framework created by Britain and France isn’t working. Iraq and Syria are coming apart: Iraq is ...

The European Union’s deal with Turkey to control the streaming of refugees into Europe has become a bittersweet issue, as some EU member states see the pact as a blackmail from Ankara to meet its longstanding demands. Finally, the EU on Wednesday gave conditional backing to visa-free travel for Turks under a migrant deal. It also announced new asylum rules ...