Opinion

At a recent business conclave in Mumbai in the context of the “Make in India Week,” CNN’s famed foreign affairs commentator Fareed Zakaria made an innocuous suggestion to India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley during the course of an interview. “Another area of job creation which strikes me,” said Zakaria, “is not quite ‘Make in India’ but ‘Visit India.’ ” Citing …

China recently announced that it is relocating 9,110 villagers to make way for a giant telescope that — among other tasks — will search for extraterrestrial life. Once the unlucky residents are gone, the government will get down to the real business of the world’s largest radio telescope: attracting the scientific talent necessary to transform China’s economy. That won’t be …

As the world’s equities markets are buffeted by bouts of intense volatility, analysts have started uttering a chilling phrase: bear market. China’s markets have entered this territory, and the US might not be too far behind. That possibility invariably leads to speculation that the declines are harbingers of worse to come, in other words, a recession. This question has attracted …

It’s economists versus the stock market. Economists generally don’t forecast a recession anytime soon. The stock market does — or at least that’s one plausible interpretation of its recent roller-coaster behaviour. Who’s right? We’ll know in a few months. Meanwhile, the dispute highlights the incomplete nature of the present recovery, which has lasted a long time but, to millions of …

The proposal to freeze oil output at January levels by Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Qatar is a silver lining for the market and crude producers, as it signifies a genuine attempt to reverse sharp slide in oil prices that has pummeled economies, markets and companies. While the deal is preliminary, it’s the first significant cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC …

For investors seeking reasons to worry about banks, here’s another: They’ve lent a lot of money in currencies that borrowers will have a hard time paying back. The phenomenon illustrates how capital flows work in a financially integrated world — and how they can contribute to booms and busts. As the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank held …

India, it seems, is replacing China as Asia’s star economy. While China’s growth has slipped below 7 percent, new reports suggest that India’s economy will expand by 7.6 percent in the fiscal year ending in March. Leaving aside the accuracy of these figures, the preoccupation with growth rates has obscured an equally important trend: China is blowing India away in …

With the price of oil at record lows, the small Southeast Asian nation of Brunei is quickly becoming the first oil-rich country to fall victim to an economic reliance on the energy industry. The hydrocarbon-dependent sultanate of 420,000 people now stands on the precipice of an economic calamity. At the apex of its 2008-2015 financial crisis, Greece’s budget deficit was …

Kyrgyzstan completed its accession to the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in August 2015, eight months after the union’s official launch and three months after Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev signed the agreements with the leaders of the other member states–Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia–in Moscow. But as Oleg Pankratov, the deputy prime minister, said at a press conference this week, the …

For decades after 1949, Hong Kong—also known as the “Pearl of the Orient”—was the envy of mainland Chinese because of its prosperity and freedom. It was naturally the top destination for hundreds of thousands of mainlanders who tried to flee from famine or political chaos. Hong Kong also used to evoke feelings of poignancy among mainlanders, because it was under …