Opinion

Every nation’s economic output moves up or down along a long-term trend, fluctuating in accordance with seasonal patterns, business and financial cycles and random shocks. In addition to those variables, the growth of India’s GDP now depends crucially on which party was in power when the activity occurred – and under which party it was measured. Disagreeing about the future ...

Who says economists can’t agree? In recent days, four reports evaluating the long-term economic impact of Brexit have been published, and they are remarkably consistent on at least two things. First, Theresa May’s deal will hurt the economy over the next decade or longer; and, second, exiting with no deal would be significantly worse. Ironically, that relative economic clarity may ...

Here’s today’s economic quiz: Was the 2007-09 Great Recession more damaging than the Great Depression of the 1930s? Surely the answer is “no.” In the 1930s, unemployment reached 25 percent. By contrast, the recent peak in the jobless rate was 10 percent. Case closed. Not so fast, objects economist J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley. “Fifty years ...

This weekend’s G-20 summit in Argentina will likely demonstrate what does and doesn’t work for this multilateral format, but also for international policy gatherings more generally. Despite weakening and diverging global economic growth, the aspiration for the larger discussions among leaders representing about three-quarters of global gross domestic product has been reduced to issuing bland joint commun- -iques — and ...

Will Shu, Deliveroo’s chief executive, is a former investment banker. So he probably knows how to cook up deal interest in a food delivery company whose riders have become a feature of British city streets. Indeed, back in September, scoops from Bloomberg News and the Daily Telegraph indicated that both Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. had held early acquisition ...

Gloom is dissipating for emerging markets, and they can thank American influence. There’s a lesson there, and a payoff. With the Federal Reserve approaching a pause in its interest-rate increases, pressure on nations like Indonesia will lighten significantly. No longer will they have to hike interest rates to buttress local currencies; they may conceivably get scope to cut. That’s a ...

When European Union (EU) leaders met in Brussels on Sunday to finalise the Brexit divorce agreement, they made one thing clear: There is no Plan B. But some Conservative lawmakers, skeptical the deal will get through parliament, are working hard on, yes, Plan B. Their basic idea – the Norway option – isn’t new. Sometimes that rumpled piece of paper ...

Bitcoin is in crisis. You can never really declare it dead — the idea of an electronic currency that is theoretically borderless and lawless will always live on somewhere — but its price has slumped 80 percent in less than a year, wiping about $700 billion off cryptocurrency markets. Where does it go from here? True believers are betting on ...

There’s a general feeling of optimism about Africa these days. And the good news, which runs deeper than rapidly improving health and quality-of-life indicators, deserves a closer look. Perhaps most significant, a relatively high proportion of sub-Saharan Africa is at peace today. It is more stable and less prone to conflict, relative to previous decades. Violence in the Congo region ...

The behaviour of Chinese officials at last weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Papua New Guinea, reportedly barging into the foreign minister’s office to try to cut mildly critical language on trade from a final communique, seemed intended to signal that China won’t budge an inch on US demands. Commerce Minister Zhong Shan has declared that those who assume ...