Opinion

  When he talks about “rigged” elections and calls for voter-identification laws to prevent fraud, Donald Trump is squarely within the Republican mainstream. The party has made passing those laws one of its highest priorities in state after state. Yet as the evidence continues to show, the type of fraud that voter ID laws could prevent is basically non-existent. Now ...

  Investors are courting Africa like never before. The resource-rich continent, which has massive business potential, is turning into the new investment hub for many countries — with Japan and China taking the lead. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is set to unveil aid and development projects at a conference in Kenya this weekend. He will meet business leaders to ...

  Ronald Reagan famously summed up the logic of government thusly: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Uber and Lyft move, so naturally, the state of Massachusetts wants to tax them. And since taxis aren’t moving nearly as much as they used to, the state wants to hand ...

  Donald Trump made a seemingly momentous announcement on Monday, jettisoning a presidential campaign’s worth of assertions that he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants and close what he has repeatedly called an “open” border. Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who interviewed Trump, was obviously stunned. After telling Trump that the news media is “running wild with this,” he asked ...

I miss 2011. Looking back, that was the heyday of economic blogging. The financial crisis had abated, but the recovery from the recession was disappointing, and everyone was talking about how to jump-start growth. Macroeconomics was important again. Now, with the U.S. economy having returned to some semblance of normal, and with political threats looming, the finer points of macroeconomic ...

  It’s been exactly two months since Britain voted to quit the European Union. Since then, the silence on how the divorce proceedings will be conducted has been deafening. It’s an impasse that helps neither side and, once Europe’s August holiday season is over and the region’s politicians are back at their desks, there’s a risk that things could turn ...

  The annual performance review seems to be on its way out at U.S. corporations. Prominent companies have been ending the practice of numerically ranking employees as well. Sounds great! Performance reviews are a pain, right? If you think getting rid of them might betoken a kinder, gentler, mellower approach to human resources, though, you might want to check out ...

Urjit Patel, the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India, has a hard act to follow. His predecessor and former boss at the central bank, Raghuram Rajan, was eminent at home and abroad, and set a high standard for talking truth to power — which could explain why he won’t be serving a second three-year term. Patel, Rajan’s quiet ...

  Brazil may have pulled off the Olympics, but its economy is still in doldrums. And the political chaos is adding to the economic misery. The country is grappling with the worst recession in more than a century as the economy shrinks sharply. Brazil’s GDP has fallen by 5.4 % year-on-year. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) slashed ...

  Yangon is suddenly a city of phablets. Nowhere in Asia, let alone Europe, have I seen so many supersized smartphones in public spaces, and with such egalitarian appeal: Pavement vendors selling early 20th century British guides to English grammar seem as transfixed by them as Yangon’s smart set playing Pokemon Go. For many in an isolated country, a 4G ...