Opinion

One of India’s most acquisitive companies is buying up cement kilns across the country, going from big to bigger. It’s got the right plan, but who’s buying the cement and actually building? Ultratech Cement Ltd. is one of the world’s biggest cement manufacturers, with the capacity to put out 90 million tons a year from plants sprinkled across India. It ...

The response to Jeff Bezos’s announcement of a $2 billion fund to create preschools and help homeless families has been muted if not skeptical. Some critics say that Bezos should give raises to Amazon workers first. Others argue that he should be taxed instead and the revenue put towards education. I’d like to speak up for private philanthropy, with the ...

As the US-China trade war escalates, with both parties imposing higher tariffs on the other, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross tried to defuse some of the tension. Because America’s 10 percent tariff on some $200 billion worth of Chinese imports is “spread across thousands and thousands of products,” he noted, “nobody is going to actually notice it at the end ...

The ongoing fight for talent in the retail industry appears to be kicking into higher gear. Bloomberg News’s Matthew Boyle wrote that Walmart Inc. has surveyed workers about whether perks such as child-care services or gym memberships would be “meaningful” to new hires. It’s just the latest example of a growing focus on the workforce. J.C. Penney Co. is reportedly ...

With the European Union summit in Salzburg this week viewed in the UK as a failure for Theresa May’s Brexit plan, the UK prime minister felt the need to issue a clarifying statement. In it, May did what she always does in negotiations: She doubled down. It was a statement for two different audiences. Her message to Europe was simple: ...

There’s a new breed of spender in charge of China’s wallets, and it’s not crazy rich Asians. The rise of Pinduoduo Inc. and the decline of JD.com Inc. are good proxies for this shift. Founded three years ago, the e-commerce site Pinduoduo processed 262 billion yuan of transactions in the second quarter, just 40 percent shy of JD’s gross merchandise ...

In the 19th and 20th centuries, a few countries got fabulously rich. These included most of Europe, parts of East Asia, some small oil producing states and parts of the former British Empire. In recent decades, more of the world — large parts of China, portions of India, Southeast Asia and part of Latin America — have joined the rich ...

China’s deep-pocketed internet giants are fighting a turf war in Indonesia, where e-commerce sales could surpass India’s as soon as 2020. The only problem is that there’s almost no path to profitability. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and JD.com Inc. already back four of the top five online-shopping startups in Southeast Asia’s most populous country. In March, Alibaba ...

Are wages determined by market forces, or do businesses get to decide what pay they offer to workers? This question gets at the heart of a lot of the debate about the economy. Why has wage growth been so sluggish for so many years? If you’re on the market-forces side of the wage question, you might answer that productivity growth ...

It has long been an accepted axiom in the United States — and also in many advanced democracies — that the future would be better than the past. People took it for granted that living standards would rise and that life would be more comfortable and stable. Well, kiss that optimism goodbye. A new survey of 27 countries finds that ...