Opinion

Trumpanomics doesn’t compute. The media keep piling on Donald Trump, because he keeps saying things that are controversial, impractical, undesirable and — in some cases — simply impossible. Into this last category has now tumbled something new: Trump told Washington Post reporters Robert Costa and Bob Woodward that he could eliminate the $19 trillion federal debt over “a period of …

Economists have once again sounded an alarm in a study that trillions of dollars worth of financial assets may be under threat from global warming by 2100, if no appropriate measures are taken to mitigate its impact. The World Economic Forum had also cautioned in January that climate change could be the biggest potential threat to the global economy in …

Elaine Ramirez SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Four years ago, a backpack-toting software engineer strutted on to South Korea’s presidential campaign stage with the vow to reform the two-party system and heal the bipartisan split with a new shade of politics. The self-made entrepreneur, antivirus creator, and former school dean Ahn Cheol-soo attracted swarms of young voters who pinned hopes on …

Last week the leaders of China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States were in Washington, D.C. to remount a political charge against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s recent behavior. It’s encouraging to see President Xi Jinping chip in for world peace alongside Asia’s other power brokers, as it is to see Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean …

Even as democracy continues to flounder in neighboring Thailand, Myanmar registered a monumental event last week, when it swore in its first democratically elected civilian president in over five decades. To be sure, this isn’t the end of the struggle for democracy in Myanmar. The country’s laws still reserve key subjects of governance – including home, defense, and border affairs …

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled over the past few years about the rise of the gig economy, sharing economy, on-demand economy, 1099 economy, freelancer economy or whatever you prefer to call it. Some of the claims about its growth have been overstated, and I’ve written several columns trying to debunk them, or at least put them in …

A paradox of our time concerns productivity. We are awash in transformative technologies — smartphones, tablets, big data — and yet the growth in labour productivity, which should benefit from all the technology, is dismal. This matters. Productivity is economic lingo for efficiency, and it’s the wellspring of higher living standards. If productivity lags, so will wages and incomes. The …

The leaked documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) could smear Panama’s image as an offshore haven for money laundering, even after it had exerted efforts to clear its name. The documents, from around 214,000 offshore entities, came from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm with offices in more than 35 countries. The leaked data, known as the …

John Power SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS North Korea’s ruling party recently called on citizens to stand up to its patron China’s “hostile schemes” in a blistering attack that invoked nuclear war with Beijing, a report has claimed. In a document distributed to provincial committees, the Workers’ Party of Korea implored party members and workers to “soundly crush China’s pressuring schemes …

Every time I write about bias against conservatives in academia, I can count on a few professors writing me to politely suggest that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes they aren’t so polite, either. How would I know what goes on in their hiring meetings, their faculty gatherings, their tenure reviews? They’re right there, and they can …