Opinion

There’s a standard playbook for reviving cities by turning them into technology clusters. But not every town can become the next Silicon Valley, or Robot City, or biotech mecca. Minneapolis has shown that there is another way. Cities such as Raleigh, San Diego and Pittsburgh have all followed a similar model: Build around a top-ranked research university; bring together elites ...

Corporations warned last week that if the Trump administration imposed tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum, consumers would pay the price. That’s wishful thinking in the C-suite. Toyota said tariffs “would substantially raise costs and therefore prices of cars and trucks sold in America.” Higher costs are undebatable. But can Toyota actually raise prices? That gets to the challenge ...

A top German court in Leipzig ruled that cities have the right to ban diesel cars. Though the incoming coalition government has vowed to avoid such bans, the ruling is a deadly blow for diesel engines in Germany, an event on a par with the country’s 2011 decision to phase out nuclear power plants. From now on, buying a diesel ...

During the 2016 presidential primaries, I found myself in a San Francisco park talking to guy who was eager to convince people not to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed trade agreement among the US and other mostly advanced economies. For all his sincerity —his backpack was adorned with anti-TPP and Bernie Sanders pins —his rationale was vague, driven ...

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) and the European Central Bank (ECB) will refrain from any major changes when their policy-making committees meet later this week, even though both economies have recently been experiencing their strongest growth in more than a decade. For now, inflation (that is deemed too low) and currencies (that are deemed too strong) will dominate the decision-making ...

Labor in China is no longer cheap, but Terry Gou may have found a new way to profit from the mainland. Gou’s Foxconn Industrial Internet Co. is poised to list in China as early as April, just two months after filing an IPO application. Its Taiwan-traded parent, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., will hold about 85 percent of Foxconn Industrial’s ...

At first glance, President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum may look like a repetition of one of President George W. Bush’s mistakes. Bush also imposed tariffs on steel in his second year in office, and like Trump did it in part to keep a campaign promise he considered helpful in the Rust Belt. Bush’s tariffs are generally ...

The most interesting part of the draft Brexit agreement the European Union published on February 28 is its complete disregard for the topsy-turvy mess that is UK’s internal politics. Something has been happening there every day —a major speech, a heated exchange, a clash of ambitions. Yet the EU’s position hasn’t evolved since the preliminary deal in December, and perhaps ...

The digital world relies on data, and no one produces more of it than China’s 1.4 billion internet users. The vast wealth of information these users emit has helped Chinese tech companies become some of the world’s best, and led to speculation that China will inevitably dominate future technologies, such as artificial intelligence. But this is almost certainly mistaken. Data, ...

US, Canadian and Mexican negotiators are cloistered in the Camino Real on the edge of Polanco in Mexico City, their sessions extending late in the night as they prepare for the arrival of ministers for the next round of talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). To contrast with the crackling tension ending the earlier meetings in Montreal, ...