Opinion

Reviving manufacturing has become a prime policy objective for national leaders from Washington to Beijing to New Delhi. We can debate whether chasing factories is worth the effort in the 21st century, but not the difficulty of building and maintaining a robust industrial sector in the face of relentless global competition and technological change. At least one country seems to ...

The 75,900 people following Lloyd Blankfein on Twitter have come to expect a regular dose of snarky Brexit commentary from the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO. Like a Zagat guide to euro-zone financial hubs, he has doled out praise to Paris and Frankfurt for its ‘nice weather,’ of course. The UK gets nul points. Blankfein frets he won’t be able ...

Oil faces some new pressures and coal is on the outs. Those were two clear messages in the many energy investments and emissions strategies announced at the recent One Planet Summit in Paris: Consider, for example, these announcements. France’s AXA plans to divest 2.4 billion euros from coal and “completely divest from the oil sands industry and associated pipelines.” ING ...

It’s hard these days to muster much interest in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Locked for years in rounds of negotiations leading nowhere, the body seems to have outlived its usefulness. Another big gathering of trade ministers ended in deadlock in Buenos Aires last week. You might wonder: Why bother? The answer is that liberal trade, second only to capitalism, ...

In 2006 the Chinese government allowed Google to establish Google.cn for Chinese internet users. In return, Google agreed to scrub results of content that the government found objectionable. The deal held until 2010, when Google decided it could no longer agree to such terms. Within hours, the site was blocked and Google’s search business on the mainland was dead. The ...

Until now, the surge in cryptocurrency markets has been a sideshow to the financial markets or the real economy. Prices have gone up a lot for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it’s fun to joke about things with names like Cardano and Monero going up a lot in value, but if it were to all go up in smoke tomorrow, ...

There is plenty of talk about how social media, artificial intelligence and robots will change our world. Virtual reality has received less attention. Yet more than 1 million headsets were shipped in the third quarter of 2017, and increases in computing power and bandwidth may make this innovation “the next big thing.” As I see it, even if the early ...

When you read words like ‘output,’ ‘economic growth’ or ‘national income,’ you’re almost always reading about gross domestic product. This measure, more than any other, has come to be equated with national prosperity and living standards. We use it to compare countries with each other, and also to compare the present with the past. But GDP misses many important things. ...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai can count the early success of Tez, the online payment system he custom-built for India, as a promising start to a gruelling fight. The first click in online shopping is shifting away from search engines like Alphabet Inc.’s Google to e-commerce behemoth Amazon.com Inc. But Google isn’t bowing out. Even with more product searches beginning within ...

Tencent Holdings Ltd. is doubling down on retail. Investors shouldn’t act so surprised. Days after confirming plans to pay around 4.2 billion yuan ($635 million) for a 5 percent stake in Yonghui Superstores Co., the Chinese social-media king announced it would outlay a similar amount for a similar stake in Vipshop Holdings Ltd. Yonghui operates a chain of supermarkets, Vipshop ...