China’s financial markets are fascinating to watch these days. Efforts by officials to decrease the nation’s enormous debt pile without destabilizing domestic markets are having profound consequences, most visibly in the bond market, where the yields on short-term debt have risen above those on longer maturities for the first time. The implications are more than just academic. In fact, they …

In one of the most important rulings in its history, the European Court of Justice gave the European Commission broad powers to negotiate trade deals without the approval of each member state. This is likely to make Brexit negotiations much easier than expected, but the final deal — if there is one — worse for the U.K. Formally, the ruling …

When we think about productivity, we often have a bias towards physical goods — things we can touch and feel, like iPhones or suits. But over the past century, as the economic historian Stephen Broadberry has shown, services, not manufacturing, have been key to explaining which countries are moving up or down the international productivity league table. And yet advanced …