Opinion

The Indian state faces one of the world’s most formidable challenges: rolling out a Covid-19 vaccination program for 1.3 billion people. To succeed, many things have to go right in a country that usually gets a lot wrong. The government would be wise to enlist the country’s private sector in this gargantuan effort — and soon. The vaccine rollout is ...

Like many things in India nowadays, the science of vaccine approval has also run into the politics of chest-thumping nationalism. Alongside authorising Covishield, the Covid-19 protection developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca Plc and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India Ltd, the country’s drugs regulator gave a go-ahead to an indigenous vaccine for which critical phase three trial data ...

Twitter doesn’t have an edit button. Despite a chorus of protest over many years, the company has declined to bow to user demand — indeed, as Covid-19 raged, Twitter trolled its 330 million users with this taunt. This absence of edit mirrors a range of controversial Twitter innovations — including switching the “validation” button from a star to a heart; ...

In the eyes of many Bitcoin advocates, scarcity is a key advantage over more conventional assets. Unlike fiat money, which can be created from nothing on a bank’s balance sheet, or gold, which can be mined from the ground in quantities still far from being exhausted, the supply of Bitcoins was set from the start at 21 million. That means, ...

At the dawn of 2021, Singapore feels like a coiled spring where growth is just waiting to be unleashed. Last-minute dinner reservations are once again almost impossible to secure and the countless malls that dot the map are hopping on weekends. The Central Expressway, a core artery running north from downtown, is again prone to congestion. Children — mercifully — ...

Four days ago, Britain completed the process of quitting the European Union, a major act of foreign policy that most of the world finds bewildering, and considers ill-advised. It brought to mind comments at an Anglo-German conference some 15 years ago made by the then-chairman of Mercedes-Benz: “I want to tell our British friends how much we hope they will ...

Texas is making another bid to become America’s technology hub. It will be an uphill battle, to put it mildly. But one seemingly small policy tweak could give the state a big boost in its quest to lure the tech industry: banning the enforcement of noncompete agreements. In the 1970s, Austin established itself as a technology cluster but never attained ...

As much as pouring cement and building towers, Brazilian construction dynasty Odebrecht was famed for its political panache. “I get down in the mud with the pigs but come out the other side clean in my white suit,” Norberto Odebrecht, founder of the legacy contractor, liked to boast back in the 1970s and 1980s. The catchphrase was shorthand for what ...

When Jamie Dimon, the head of America’s largest bank, says the US economy is in jeopardy, Federal Reserve policy makers and elected officials ought to take notice. This detail was tucked away in a Wall Street Journal profile of JPMorgan Chase & Co’s chief executive officer published near Christmas. The article began with his near-death experience in early March just ...

As the year began, so it ended. Early in 2020, the pandemic blindsided governments, which dithered over both the scientific and moral imperatives while much of the populace indulged in selfish and conflicted behaviour that seemed to belong in “Glengarry Glen Ross” or “Lord of the Flies” rather than in a modern democracy. Those same problems now afflict the distribution ...