Opinion

It’s become a bipartisan article of faith that US schools need to train more students in STEM. Yet the vast majority of good-paying jobs, now and in the future, don’t require knowing how to code. Improving basic digital skills is a more cost-effective way to boost workers and businesses. There are roughly 14 million ‘middle-skilled’ jobs in the US that …

The usual Brexit disclaimer — the UK has no good options, only less-bad ones — applies with extra force when it comes to the dilemma over the Irish border. Nevertheless, the issue will be easier to address, if not resolve, once the UK and European Union start trade negotiations in earnest. There is currently no physical border between Northern Ireland, …

Before the six-member committee that sets monetary policy for the Reserve Bank of India met this week, the government in New Delhi made its preferences very clear. Two members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic advisory council—a body that he did without for a long time, but which was recently reconstituted following several policy stumbles—publicly declared that real interest rates …

The case of the missing inflation is unresolved, but the fiscal file may have been solved. Good news: The victim is still alive and might start kicking as well. Fiscal policy is shaping up for a good 2018. The impetus mostly takes the form of tax cuts, and is coming from Asia, Europe and the US. We have grown so …

Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project recently wrote an article in The New York Times suggesting a policy idea that seems extremely promising and woefully overlooked. That idea is what Bruenig calls a social wealth fund—a government-owned portfolio of stocks, bonds and real estate whose dividends would be paid out directly to the citizenry. This is similar to what …

I’ve seen hundreds of articles on President Donald Trump and trade, but the real significance of the Trump economic revolution — for better or worse — is a focus on investment. There is no coordinating mastermind, but if you consider the intersection between what the Trumpian nationalists want and what a Republican Congress will deliver, it’s this: wanting to make …

“Insider trading is not about fairness,” I often say; “it’s about theft.” It’s not a crime to know things that other people do not know, and to trade on your knowledge. In fact it is good. In fact it is the point of securities markets, or a point of them anyway: Society wants capital to flow to good projects and …

The UK has a productivity problem and its Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is out to solve it. At first glance, its new plan exemplifies the problem — a 255-page tome published on Monday is longer on blue-skies reflection than detailed policy. Still, government needs to be to held to account when it meddles in business, and the …

In their rush to pass something, anything, that they can call ‘tax reform,’ congressional Republicans have achieved the impossible: They have made an awful plan even worse. The first thing to note about the bill the Senate passed early Saturday is that it is not, by any reasonable definition of the term, tax reform. The elements of a smart reform …

Eight years since the birth of bitcoin, central banks around the world are increasingly recognizing the potential upsides and downsides of digital currencies. The guardians of the global economy have two sets of issues to address. First is what to do, if anything, about emergence and growth of the private cryptocurrencies that are grabbing more and more attention — with …