Opinion

Several months behind schedule, the New Zealand Defense White Paper was released last week in Wellington. It has earmarked funding of around NZ$20 billion (US$14 billion) over 15 years for defense, which will be used, among other things, to replace frigates and aircraft and to provide the New Zealand Defense Force with a cyber warfare capability. This investment is the ...

  Shi Zhiqin SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS In the last week of May the “Old World” met at Japan’s G7 summit. In just a few months time, in September 2016, the “New World” will be meeting at China’s G20 summit. Between those two global summits, Britain will decide on its future in or out of the EU, the eurozone will ...

  The deadly Orlando incident,once again, sheds light on genuine challenges lone wolf terrorists, who act in isolation from the main mastermind, pose to security agencies around the world. At certain points, the law enforcement authorities find it difficult to pursue suspects without sufficient evidence out of fear they would infringe on civil rights. Yet, Orlando demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt ...

  Mark Gilbert Once upon a time, the euro had aspirations to challenge the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency of choice. Instead, the common European currency is losing favor as a store of value. And as European banks scale back their trading activities, the euro’s role on the global stage is likely to diminish further. Almost a decade ...

  Helen Clark SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS I’m late to the story here, but Singapore and Australia signed a large defense deal in May and expanded their free trade agreement, the SAFTA, first signed in 2003, the first for Australia since a 1983 deal with New Zealand. Australia and Singapore have had a generally strong friendship, and one better than ...

  On June 7, the United States, India, and Japan began the twentieth iteration of the Malabar Exercise. In the two decades of its existence, the exercise, which began as a joint U.S.-India naval drill back in 1992, has evolved into not just a key aspect of U.S.-India defense ties, but a key platform for engagement in the Indo-Pacific more ...

  David Gitter SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS The term “innovation” has been a hot word these days in Chinese politics. It was one of the five high-frequency terms used by General Secretary Xi Jinping in his deliberations at this year’s National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (the others were reform, people’s livelihood, ecology, and work style), ...

There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused. The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,” and it’s what you hear in a ...

WASHINGTON President Obama unintentionally damaged his legacy the other day by urging an expansion of Social Security benefits and, thereby, reminding everyone (and particularly future historians) that he failed to deal with one of the largest issues facing the country: an aging society. “It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees ...

  Opponents in Venezuela are pushing President Nicolas Maduro to the wall, accusing him of driving the oil-rich country to the brink of economic collaps. They have launched a marathon process to call a vote on ousting him from office. But Maduro is defiant as he vowed on Saturday that the government would be suing to have the referendum request ...