Opinion

  Two back-to-back stinging defeats have rattled German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The internal splits are palpable now. Even though Merkel has dropped the “we can do it” rallying cry on migrants, she has refused to put a cap on migration. This is a bold and righteous move, but to convince her coalition partners about her stand ...

  From Erie in the west to Scranton in the east, Pennsylvania is flecked with casualties the stubborn economic sluggishness and relentless globalization have inflicted on industrial communities. But in this middle-class Philadelphia suburb, Tom Danzi knows that the economy is denting even his business repairing damaged cars. His Suburban Collision Specialists once had 27 employees kept busy by drivers ...

  For many years, China’s authorities took a Goldilocks approach to housing prices: They wanted a market that was neither too hot nor too cold, and took measures as needed to control prices. Although an explicit asset-price target was never announced, it was widely assumed that the government wanted home prices to grow in line with the rate of economic ...

  In the years since the 2008-09 financial crisis, cracks have appeared in the global hegemony of neoliberalism. The pressure to favour free markets and reject the social-welfare model has moderated somewhat. In the U.S., President Barack Obama succeeded in installing the first general health-insurance system in the country’s history. Thus Washington has moved closer toward the European welfare state ...

  The betting is that the Federal Reserve won’t raise interest rates at this week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, its key policymaking body. There are already complaints that the Fed, which cut short-term rates to near zero in late 2008, is waiting too long to reverse low rates. Last December, the Fed increased rates by a quarter ...

  Data is the raw material we use as the basis for analysis. Investors demand it. Baseball fans love it. Quants live for it. Pollsters depend on it. Data is the difference between anecdote and evidence, between opinion and facts, between life and death (ask a surgeon or airline pilot). Data drives the economic world around us. It is how ...

  By speeding the demise of coal, which is far dirtier, cheap natural gas has done as much to reduce carbon emissions as any government regulation. But the returns are already diminishing: Natural gas also emits carbon dioxide, and this year for the first time the amount will exceed that of coal in the U.S. The most efficient way to ...

  On Saturday, donors to the Global Fund pledged nearly $13billion to eradicate the three deadly maladies — AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria — by 2030. The money is expected to help save 8 million lives. The Global Fund demonstrates that collective effort and global commitment can do wonders. Since 2002, the Fund has spent $30 billion to fight the three ...

Shinzo Abe’s recent promise of $30 billion in financing to African countries over the next three years shouldn’t have come as a great surprise. Quietly, over decades, Japan has become the leading financier of growth-supporting infrastructure across large swathes of the developing world. Perhaps too quietly. In fact, few people outside the country appreciate the scope of Japan’s overseas development ...

  Trade agreements are stalled or collapsing. Brexit won. World trade volume is slowing down. Has globalization hit a wall? Not exactly. Globalization isn’t so much slowing as it is taking new forms. The most potent form of globalization today is occurring inside nations, notably China and India. Globalization typically is defined as the movement of goods, services, ideas, labor ...