Opinion

In the past few years the rhetorical back and forth between China and the United States over economic institutional governance has intensified. Along with concerns over the governance of multilateral development banks and the role of China’s currency in the International Monetary Fund, free trade agreements (FTA) have become part of a war of words over the future of the ...

  Michael Froman When the winds of change blow, a Chinese proverb says, some people build walls and others build windmills. Given the tremendous environmental challenges the world faces, it’s not enough just to build windmills. We need to develop a range of innovative environmental technologies, and we need to break down barriers to trading them worldwide. Global trade in ...

Sharing economy platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have been struggling as some European countries attempt to regulate and make sense of their business. The European Union has finally come up with some guiding principles for its members, mildly telling them that the “collaborative economy,” as the bureaucrats call it, is generally a good thing that shouldn’t be banned. The ...

I don’t know whether a President Donald Trump would be able to destroy U.S. democracy by crushing the institutions that share power with the executive. I tend to agree with Brian Beutler that the institutions Trump might go after would fight back effectively — though I’m not eager to test that proposition. Nonetheless, I think Trump is dangerous to democracy ...

  Adam Minter Indonesia is drowning in plastic trash. Bottles pollute its beaches, bags congest its waterways and instant-noodle cups overflow its garbage bins. It’s only getting worse: By 2019, Indonesia will generate about 5 percent more trash than it did in 2014, and about 15 percent of that will be plastic. Fixing this problem has become a priority for ...

  The differences between China and the U.S. over the South China Sea issue have become a matter of concern and even anxiety. But some of the perceptions in the U.S. and elsewhere about China’s policy and intentions in the area are misplaced. A pressing task is to understand the facts and China’s intentions correctly so as to avoid real ...

LONDON Sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of the House of Lords, watching the Thames flow, Lord Nigel Lawson explains that the June 23 referendum, which he hopes will withdraw Britain from the European Union, was never supposed to happen. It is, he says, the fulfillment of a promise Prime Minister David Cameron expected to be prevented from keeping. Going into ...

  2015 saw record worldwide investment and implementation of clean energy such as wind, solar and hydropower. This might have been driven by strategic sustainable development plans that aim to reduce dependence on fossil energy, with an ultimate goal set on the reduction of CO2 emissions. Prompted by environment awareness and sustainability plans, many countries have started to opt for ...

  John Brandon SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Get ready to take some Tylenol VR, folks. We might need that (totally made-up) medication someday if a Forrester prediction comes to fruition. Analysts are saying there could be as many as 52 million headsets sold by 2020, made up mostly of the recently released HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. The Forrester ...

  Earlier this month Greece’s government announced the formation of a privatization “superfund” to sell off state-owned assets, including the Greek railways, postal service and a number of utilities. Its scope – the sale of 50 billion euros in state assets – comes a close second in scale to the privatizations of the 1980s in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. The ...