Opinion

  Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe comes to Washington this Friday bearing gifts, reportedly including a proposal to invest billions in U.S. railroads, bridges and highways. The investment is sorely needed, and the offer will no doubt be appreciated. Still, it’s hard not to ask: Has it come to this? President Donald Trump seems to favour a transactional approach to …

  Silicon Valley’s biggest firms strongly reacted to US President Donald Trump’s travel ban. They argue that tech world needs immigrants’ creativity and energy to stay competitive. About 58 percent of the engineers and other high-skill employees in Silicon Valley were born outside the US. Hence it is nature that tech giants are against the travel ban. Though the tech …

  When the International Monetary Fund’s board met on Monday to discuss Greece, it was heartening to read that “most Executive Directors” agreed with the staff’s view that the country’s debt, at 179 percent of gross domestic product at the end of 2015, was “unsustainable.” Yet “some directors had different views on the fiscal path and debt sustainability.” This division …

  The Reserve Bank of India has not exactly covered itself in glory since Nov. 8, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi sprung the news on a startled nation that 86 percent of its currency would be worthless within a few hours. The central bank’s refusal to release up-to-date data about the demonetization, its constant stream of confusing and contradictory orders …

  President Donald Trump is right about one thing: The US trade deficit with the rest of the world — which topped $500 billion last year — is unhealthy. It puts upward pressure on U.S. unemployment that can only be countered with policies that lead to rising debt. It doesn’t follow, however, that the worst culprits are always the countries …

  In his first few weeks in office, President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confirmed his intention to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. The consensus is that it won’t be long before he turns his focus to China, which he calls a currency manipulator. China can weather such criticism, for …

  Some people who study climate change believe that addressing it later — when economic growth has made humanity wealthier — would be better than taking drastic measures immediately. Now, though, one of this group’s most influential members appears to have changed his mind. In the early 1990s, Yale’s William Nordhaus was among the first to examine the economics of …

  Last week, an Indian government official announced that iPhones will start rolling off an assembly line in Bangalore by the end of April, targeted at local customers. It’s a big moment for Apple Inc., which is counting on India’s emerging middle class to make up for slowing sales in other markets. But don’t bet on the iPhone conquering India, …

  Drug pricing is a conundrum for the country, and apparently for Donald Trump too. Last week, some pharma CEOs came out of a meeting with the new president believing he’d dropped his previously stated support for direct Medicare negotiation of drug prices. But at a press conference on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump had not, in fact, …

The Cold War was waged and won in many places, including this beach city, home to the RAND Corp. Created in 1948 to think about research and development as it effects military planning and procurement, RAND pioneered strategic thinking about nuclear weapons in the context of the US-Soviet competition. Seven decades later it is thinking about the nuclear threat from …