Opinion

  As India continues its scorched-earth campaign against cash, the question baffling many analysts is why a country so unfamiliar with digital payments would outlaw 86 percent of its currency, the most-favoured method of settling transactions. Sample the following three factoids from a study led by Tufts University researchers: Fewer than 10% of Indians have ever used any kind of ...

  A little over a year ago, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) swept to power promising to challenge the political elite, restore national control of the country’s affairs, and realign government with traditional conservative values. Since then concerns have grown, at home and in Europe’s capitals, that Poland has taken a wrong turn. The government’s most recent moves do ...

  An off-duty Turkish cop killed Andrey Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Ankara. If this killing had happened few months back, the repercussion would have been unimaginable. The murder of Andrey Karlov, the first Moscow envoy to be killed in his post in almost 90 years, was an open provocation aimed at derailing the normalisation of Russian-Turkish relations and Syria peace ...

  The past year was dominated by the bitter presidential election. But during the precious, brief moments when I was able to unplug from the madness and read about economics, I found a lot of great material. Here’s a list of 10 excellent economics books and papers I read in 2016 that should be accessible to the general public. 1. ...

  It had become something of a ritual. Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would release the results of its PISA exams, which are given to hundreds of thousands of students in dozens of countries. And every three years, an American freak-out would ensue, as Chinese students seemed to be outperforming their U.S. counterparts by a ...

  Any conversation with a European bank executive these days quickly turns to talk of how their US rivals are in better shape. American banks were much quicker in bolstering their capital bases after the financial crisis; they also have more regulatory certainty (in part because they didn’t challenge every proposed rule change). And in at least one corner of ...

  The board of the International Monetary Fund was right to reaffirm its full confidence in Christine Lagarde as the institution’s managing director despite her conviction for negligence on Monday by a Paris court. She has done a good job as the head of one of the world’s most important multilateral institutions. But there’s more to be done by the ...

  Less than a decade ago, the International Monetary Fund used to talk about Asian countries piling up too much in their currency- reserve stockpiles. The global financial crisis turned that conclusion on its head, and now that US interest rates are poised to keep climbing, the race is on to identify which countries have the strongest buffers against capital ...

  President-elect Donald Trump has made a point of shaking things up. In domestic policy, this taste for disorder is risky. In foreign policy, it could be calamitous. Trump isn’t yet president, so it’s early to be drawing conclusions. But concern is warranted. Trump rejects the status quo in America’s relations with the rest of the world, and seems to ...

  Thousands of dejected and distressed Syrians left the rebel enclave of Aleppo on Monday as the UN Security Council unanimously voted to deploy observers there. The council also announced the plan for a new peace talks in Geneva in February. Families in Aleppo had spent hours waiting in below-freezing temperatures, sheltering from the rain in bombed-out apartment blocks and ...