Opinion

Economists are famously bad at predicting growth. A new technique might help them get a little better. When assessing a country’s potential to prosper, economists typically look at aggregate measures such as education, investment or national debt. This hasn’t worked particularly well: China’s economy, for example, has kept growing at a fast pace even though they’ve been predicting a slowdown ...

Annoyed by Congress’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration is redoubling its efforts to undermine the law. The latest act of sabotage: Top federal health officials have been told not to help states sign up Americans for insurance policies as part of this fall’s open enrollment period. Reducing the number of people who buy policies will ...

Those cheering the looming departure of Wolfgang Schaeuble from the German Ministry of Finance should not do much. His successor may not be as ornery, but southern Europeans—and above all Greeks—shouldn’t expect any better treatment. Schaeuble has held a wide range of positions since he was first elected to the German parliament in 1972; he’s been interior minister, chief of ...

This past week, I gave a lecture to a Georgetown University graduate seminar. The instructor’s challenge to me was to talk about technology as integral to energy security. Here is the argument I laid out for these students. In wind and solar energy—which only significantly depend on hydrocarbons during manufacturing and transport—technology is a relatively simple lens on energy. For ...

When discussing Japan’s debt, most people get caught up in the issue of fiscal solvency. As everyone by now knows, Japan has a very high level of debt versus gross domestic product: This attention-grabbing number—about twice the level of the US—often gets people asking whether Japan will default. Some believe a default is likely when the country runs out of ...

Donald Trump isn’t draining the swamp. The president unveiled his long-awaited “tax reform” package last week, and although many crucial details were missing (for example, the income brackets), he was full of accolades. “This is a revolutionary change,” he said. Well, not yet. The federal income tax system—almost everyone seems to agree—is a mess. It features relatively high nominal rates ...

The new chief executive of Uber Technologies Inc. is on a crusade to repair a corporate reputation that’s been badly damaged by scandals over its treatment of women and broader corporate culture. Dara Khosrowshahi even apologized after London’s transport regulator revoked Uber’s local license because of failures to run proper background checks on drivers and report alleged crimes. Losses last ...

Warren Buffett may have won his decade-long bet against hedge funds, but can his advice to investors to use only low-cost index funds beat the red-hot record of wealth managers? Readers of the 2017 Capgemini World Wealth Report, released on Thursday, will be shaking their heads. High-net-worth individuals reported an average 24 percent return last year on assets managed by ...

With Puerto Rico sweltering in the dark, restoring electricity as soon as possible is vital to averting a humanitarian disaster. The island’s long-term recovery, however, will depend not only on repairing its battered grid but on reforming its feckless power company. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the biggest public utility in the US, is notorious for its mismanagement and ...

As she builds her new coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be mindful of the need to counter nationalism at home and the imperative of finding a consensus on integration in the euro zone. But the election also exposed a demographic rift that could present an even bigger challenge to Germany’s leaders: between a graying population that backed the ...