Opinion

  I spent most of the last two days driving and walking along the border fence at Brownsville, Texas. It’s not the first barrier of this kind that I’ve seen. They’re going up everywhere — in more than 40 countries now: Donald Trump’s calls for a powerful border wall are part of a trend. Though their reasons for existence, styles …

There has been a lot of heated debate in the news media and the election campaigns about international trade. In the first presidential debate, candidate Donald Trump relentlessly flogged the issue, declaring that trade had hollowed out American industry. On the left, antitrade sentiment continues to simmer, much of it focused on opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Meanwhile, the economics …

  The latest food safety scandal in China might be its most damaging. Earlier this week, a former doctoral student at one of the country’s national testing centers for genetically modified organisms went public with allegations of scientific fraud, including claims that records were doctored extensively, that unqualified personnel were employed under illegal contracts and —most seriously — that authorities …

  Among investors and economists who study China, few arguments are more contentious than growth — more specifically, how to measure it. Officially, China’s economy has been growing at an annualized rate of nearly 10 percent for the past three decades. But plenty of analysts will argue that those figures are highly optimistic. Why should this debate matter? After all, …

  The entire 90-minute debate on Monday night was a demonstration that Donald Trump doesn’t have the temperament to be president. Hillary Clinton was prepared — she always is — and she baited Trump early and often. And Trump got caught each time. He also hooked himself, including in at least two exchanges with moderator Lester Holt (who did an …

  It’s entirely unsurprising — expected, really — for the anti-global European left to oppose a trade deal with America. But with Canada? The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, painstakingly negotiated over seven years, would cut trade barriers between Europe and the world’s 10th-largest economy. Unlike the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the U.S. (which …

  A mega meeting to check the booming illegal wildlife trade — valued at $20 billion a year — under way in Johannesburg has got stuck in an unseemly fight. The clash comes on the heels of a report which says that the population of African elephants has declined by 111,000 in the past ten years due to surge in …

  From hungry migrant peasant to rock-star president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has played many roles over the years. Even so, taking the defendant’s chair in Latin America’s biggest political graft scandal will be a first. Lula has vehemently denied the charges — he’s accused of taking some $1.1 million in bribes disguised as home improvements from a contractor …

  The muscle behind the U.S. economic expansion is the same as the recovery’s weakness, and it lies in one word: Mexico. Since the low in December 2009, employment in the U.S. has increased by 13.6 million workers. Forty-three percent of that growth, or 5.9 million workers, came from Hispanics — some born in the U.S., others immigrants. Mexico is …

  The longer I work in the news media, the more I notice a problem with the way economics interacts with the world at large. Just to cite one example, economists often don’t take politics into account. As a result, econ models leave out important pieces, and the advice of economists often falls on deaf ears or is seen as …