Opinion

  Should you trust economists? For many people nowadays, the answer is “no.” Economists failed to predict the Great Recession. Their prescriptions — quantitative easing, for example — didn’t seem to help speed the recovery much. During the past three decades, a lot of their big policy ideas — financial deregulation, tax cuts, privatization and the free movement of capital ...

  Even Inditex SA can’t defy gravity forever. The Spanish owner of the Zara fashion chain is still delivering the sort of sales growth rivals can only dream about. Same-store sales rose 10 percent in the year through January, the fastest rate in 14 years. By contrast, many competitors are struggling to generate growth on the same basis. But the ...

  China is nothing if not creative in protecting its local industries. Although it has liberalized its economy in recent years, it has also erected a sophisticated set of barriers to safeguard companies it views as national champions. Increasingly, this is a counterproductive approach. The usual method of assessing protectionism is to look at metrics such as tariff rates. And ...

  What we learned from the latest ‘score’ by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) of Obamacare and the Trump administration’s ‘repeal and replace’ plan is what we should have known all along. To wit: If people have health insurance, they will use more health services — visits to doctors’ offices, more tests, procedures and drugs — and health spending will ...

  India’s generic drug-making industry is getting wheeled out of intensive care. But is it really going home? The US Food and Drug Administration this week lifted the import ban on a factory that Mumbai-based Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. inherited as part of its takeover of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. The plant, in Punjab state, became the third owned by Ranbaxy ...

  After his party’s triumph in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and most politically important, Prime Minister Narendra Modi now wields greater power than any Indian leader in a generation. He will need it if he wants to continue to reshape India’s economy. True, the results don’t drastically alter the math in the upper house of Parliament in ...

  The victory of Dutch Prime Minster Mark Rutte in the parliamentary election against anti-Islam, Eurosceptic Geert Wilders hammered a nail in the coffin of Europe’s misplaced populism. Initial results suggested Rutte’s party won 32 seats, 13 more than Wilders’ party 19 seats. Rutte’s good show and a disappointing defeat of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands election have invigorated traditional ...

  China’s National People’s Congress, which concluded on Wednesday, didn’t do much to ease the main worry about the world’s second-biggest economy: its large and growing pile of debt. In fact, to keep GDP growth ticking over at 6.5 percent or more, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged a 12 percent expansion in credit this year. That implies about $2.7 trillion ...

  Even Inditex SA can’t defy gravity forever. The Spanish owner of the Zara fashion chain is still delivering the sort of sales growth rivals can only dream about. Same-store sales rose 10 percent in the year through January, the fastest rate in 14 years. By contrast, many competitors are struggling to generate growth on the same basis. But the ...

  When a mountain of trash collapsed at the fetid Reppi dump outside of Addis Ababa on Monday, at least 82 people died. It could’ve been worse: Hundreds of people live atop Reppi, Ethiopia’s biggest waste dump, trying to make a living from salvaging what city residents throw away. Despite well-known dangers, and the best efforts of the government, they’ve ...