Opinion

As a child in 1943, the Indian economist Amartya Sen watched one of the worst famines of the 20th century sweep through his native Bengal. Contrary to the popular image, the disaster didn’t manifest as a widespread shortage of food, he later wrote. The middle classes hadn’t “experienced the slightest problem during the entire famine,” which primarily affected ”landless rural ...

The trade deal between the European Union and four of Latin America’s biggest economies is a sharp riposte to both US President Donald Trump and Britain’s Brexiters. The agreement, reached after 20 years of negotiations, will end tariffs on 93 percent of Mercosur’s exports to the EU over time, with the rest getting “preferential treatment.” European companies — including those ...

As US anti-monopoly authorities weigh possible investigations into America’s technology superpowers, there is one advantage the government can’t touch: the size, scale and might of the tech giants’ computer networks, logistics machines and other infrastructure. This week, Bloomberg News wrote about the irony of the last decade of flourishing technology startups. Many of the upstarts might not exist without the ...

Nobody likes a big grocery bill. Unless you’re a venture capitalist, of course. With the cost of produce skyrocketing in China, hot money is flooding towards fresh-food operators. Yonghui Superstores Co., a $14 billion firm that counts Tencent Holdings Ltd. as a strategic investor, now trades above 40 times 2019 earnings. Shares of Jiajiayue Group Co., a smaller supermarket chain, ...

Italy’s populist leaders have spent the best part of a year looking for the outside forces who were driving up the country’s cost of issuing public debt. The answer, it turns out, was closer to home. This week the yield on Italy’s 10-year bonds fell below 2 percent, while the interest on two-year debt turned negative. The yield spread with ...

If California Sen. Kamala Harris is elected president in 2020 and reelected in 2024, by the time she leaves office 114 months from now she might have a coherent answer to the question of whether Americans should be forbidden to have what 217 million of them currently have: private health insurance. Her 22 weeks of contradictory statements, and her Trumpian ...

Bad news in China might just be good news for Australia. That may sound counterintuitive, given the two economies are so closely intertwined. But Beijing’s efforts to stimulate its slackening economy are boosting the price of iron ore, among Australia’s biggest exports. Steel mills in China are humming. Tax cuts and steps to boost consumption stand to shore up Australia ...

Defenders of free markets have always portrayed them as rife with healthy competition. Striving to outdo each other in providing high-quality products to consumers at ever-lower prices, according to this narrative, companies only profit from the hard work they do and the risks they take. This means that corporate profits should grow roughly at the rate of the economy as ...

In war, even the winners pay a price. Vietnam’s portrayal as a clear beneficiary of the US-China trade conflict was overdue for a reality check. President Donald Trump provided one, trash talking the country with the kind of language he once reserved for China and Mexico. Vietnam is “almost the single worst abuser of everybody,” he declared to Fox Business ...

China’s private enterprises under President Xi Jinping appear to be holding the short end of the stick. The government’s earnest deleveraging campaign has hit the sector disproportionately hard, and a never-ending trade war with the US has hurt manufacturing, the core of China’s entrepreneurial spirit. That’s only part of the story. Private businesses aren’t merely innocent lambs waiting on Beijing’s ...