Opinion

  There is no gainsaying the fact that globalization has produced many economic benefits and free trade has spurred global prosperity. However, of late, protectionism is taking over economic liberalization and has triggered a rising concern in emerging economies. Leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Lima expressed wariness about the peril that protectionism poses to global economy. ...

Stories of shady Russian influence abounded during the U.S. election campaign, but the evidence in them was often sketchy and the eventual benefits to Russia questionable. The European Union, for its part, is dealing with a scandal in which both the Russian connection and the gain for the Kremlin are far less nebulous. On May 18, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger ...

  Amid whiffs of chemicals and the electric hum of transformers, Kraftwerk Jaenschwalde rises like an ash-colored fortress over a landscape disfigured by decades of open-pit coal mining. The communist-era colossus in eastern Germany is one of Europe’s dirtiest power plants, belching 24 million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the air every year. It could have been closed for ...

    Mark Whitehouse Do we have the 2008 financial crisis to thank for Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? More than a century of human experience suggests it’s a real possibility. Trump’s surprise victory has prompted a lot of worrying about the wave of antiestablishment — and often xenophobic — sentiment that seems to be rolling across the developed ...

  Before President-elect Donald Trump brings in the bulldozers to “drain the swamp” in Washington, I hope he will consider the career achievements of two people who embody the nation’s tradition of bipartisan foreign policy leadership, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. The two former national security advisers came from vastly different worlds to join in constructing the foreign policy tradition ...

  It may be useful to imagine for the duration of Europe’s upcoming election season that we live in a world without public polling. Would that make further populist surprises look more or less likely? The post-Brexit, post-Trump world is not necessarily “post-truth” despite a certain blurring of lines between fact and spin. It is, however, definitely post-poll. U.S. pollsters ...

  Nobody is really sure what Donald Trump will want from the Federal Reserve during his presidency: Will he try to make it adopt the “hard money” views of many people in his party, or will he want it to err on the side of letting the economy run hot? Since we might not know the answer for some time, ...

  The UAE is right on track to become world’s innovation capital. Its comprehensive and visionary policies are creating a conducive climate for innovation and innovators to thrive. As laid down in the National Innovation Strategy, innovation is being encouraged in key sectors like renewable energy, transport, education, health, technology, water and space. The second Innovation Week — which kicked ...

  What does the election of Donald Trump mean for macroeconomics? Above all else, it means that the half-century-long challenge to Keynesian ideas is over. The insurgents lost. First, some background. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes suggested that government spending would boost the economy, by increasing aggregate demand. In a recession, there are unused resources — empty offices, ...

  There are times when a confluence of events creates a rare opportunity. The U.S. now is at one of those the moments. To wit: As of January, a single party will control the executive and legislative branches of government; Campaign promises were made by the president-elect to upgrade infrastructure; The U.S. federal debt is almost $20 trillion; The U.S. ...