Opinion

  Data is the raw material we use as the basis for analysis. Investors demand it. Baseball fans love it. Quants live for it. Pollsters depend on it. Data is the difference between anecdote and evidence, between opinion and facts, between life and death (ask a surgeon or airline pilot). Data drives the economic world around us. It is how …

  By speeding the demise of coal, which is far dirtier, cheap natural gas has done as much to reduce carbon emissions as any government regulation. But the returns are already diminishing: Natural gas also emits carbon dioxide, and this year for the first time the amount will exceed that of coal in the U.S. The most efficient way to …

  On Saturday, donors to the Global Fund pledged nearly $13billion to eradicate the three deadly maladies — AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria — by 2030. The money is expected to help save 8 million lives. The Global Fund demonstrates that collective effort and global commitment can do wonders. Since 2002, the Fund has spent $30 billion to fight the three …

Shinzo Abe’s recent promise of $30 billion in financing to African countries over the next three years shouldn’t have come as a great surprise. Quietly, over decades, Japan has become the leading financier of growth-supporting infrastructure across large swathes of the developing world. Perhaps too quietly. In fact, few people outside the country appreciate the scope of Japan’s overseas development …

  Trade agreements are stalled or collapsing. Brexit won. World trade volume is slowing down. Has globalization hit a wall? Not exactly. Globalization isn’t so much slowing as it is taking new forms. The most potent form of globalization today is occurring inside nations, notably China and India. Globalization typically is defined as the movement of goods, services, ideas, labor …

  The European Union has never been homogeneous, but recent policy clashes and particularly the immigration issue are making its split into three sub-blocs — the North, the South and the East — increasingly visible. Two strongmen, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s ruling party, make no secret of trying to create an axis for …

  Faced with Russian nuclear threats during the Cold War, the strategist Herman Kahn calibrated a macabre ladder of escalation, with 44 different rungs ranging from “Ostensible Crisis” to “Spasm or Insensate War.” In the era of cyberwarfare that’s now dawning, the rules of the game haven’t yet been established with such coldblooded precision. That’s why this period of Russian-American …

  In the mostly very positive report on U.S. income and poverty in 2015 that the Census Bureau released this week, there was one sour note. As the Wall Street Journal reported: Income gains were spread across nearly all age groups, household types, regions and racial or ethnic groups. One exception: Incomes didn’t rise for households living outside metropolitan areas. …

  Most people will never glimpse the vast underwater mountains and canyons off Cape Cod that President Barack Obama designated as a national monument Thursday. The same goes for the hundreds of thousands of submerged square miles that the U.K., Ecuador, Costa Rica and other countries have just protected, and for the half-million square miles near Hawaii that Obama recently …

Bratislava summit was meant to fast-track the European Union’s introspection and it seems to have served its purpose. Waking up from its complacency after Brexit, the 27 leaders’ meeting looked into ways to prevent the disintegration and dislocation that the bloc is facing. The EU is grappling with the greatest ever threat to its existence. And minus Britain, it is …