Opinion

  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claimed in his New Year’s message that the development of banned intercontinental long-range missiles is in ‘final stages’. US president-elect tweeted the following day: it won’t happen. Kim also vowed to further enhance his country’s military capability unless the US ends war games with rival South Korea. Trump is confident that Pyongyang will …

  This is the year that active-investment management makes its return to form. It is the year, or so we are told, when active fights back, scores some points, and gets its revenge on passive indexers. For the record, active management never went away. The claim that it has returned, after a run of fairly horrific performance, is likely little …

  When the temperature drops to freezing in a country of almost 1.4 billion people, the power needed to keep the population warm soars. That’s one of the main reasons China’s northern cities have spent much of the past month choking on smoggy, toxic air. Particulate concentrations in areas north of Shanghai that once qualified for state heating subsidies and …

  It’s hardly a happy new year for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Just before Christmas, the US Trade Representative added Alibaba’s Taobao e-commerce site to a list of “notorious markets” that traffic in counterfeits. That’s an unseemly place for a publicly held company: Other members include a Chinese shopping mall that specializes in counterfeit leather goods and a Paraguayan border …

  The data scientists writing the algorithms that drive giants like Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Facebook Inc. are today’s technology wizards, and companies and governments increasingly use their creations — often in secret and with little oversight — to do everything from hiring and firing employees to identifying likely suspects for police monitoring. But there’s a dark side — and …

  If there’s one thing economists tend to agree on, it’s the benefits of free movement of labor. Lowering barriers to immigration has the power to add up to $90 trillion a year to the global economy, doubling global gross domestic product and dwarfing the impact of reducing barriers to trade and capital flows. Not only does immigration boost the …

  Decades from now, when historians look back on 2016, they’ll of course take note of the momentous votes on both sides of the Atlantic. But if they’re interested in symbolism, they might find that an even more profound turning point occurred over the English countryside in early December, when a little flying robot buzzed though the air, alighted on …

  South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached after a corruption scandal, rejected on Sunday the accusations that she conspired with a longtime friend to extort money and favours from companies. Park denied that her jailed friend, Choi Soon-sil, influenced government decisions. She also vehemently refuted allegations that her administration blacklisted thousands of artists for their political beliefs. It …

  The US is a place where the big things — health care, infrastructure and asset management to name a few — just cost too much. Price transparency is an underrated tool for bringing down those costs. In economics classes, we teach something called the law of one price — the cost of the same good or service shouldn’t be …

  Each December, China’s leaders meet to lay out their economic agenda for the next year. And each December, China-watchers pore over their every word, much like Kremlinologists during the Cold War. It bears remembering that these pronouncements are rarely predictive, and that the best sources of insight on China’s economy are usually found elsewhere. Here are a few key …