China’s top leaders meet this week in Beijing to set economic policy objectives for the coming year. The central question is whether they will do what they want or what the country needs. Clear evidence has emerged in the past couple of months that the Chinese economy is slowing to an uncomfortable degree. That’s raised expectations that the leadership will ...

Critics have called the resignation of India’s former central bank chief Urjit Patel and appointment of former Finance Ministry official Shaktikanta Das as his replacement a blow to the hard-won independence of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Such fears are overblown. The changeover at the RBI is something else entirely: an opportunity to rebuild the central bank’s badly damaged ...

Whenever a Japanese company acquires an overseas asset, the rationale is typically that it’s finding a way to survive the country’s aging demographics and shrinking returns. But Hitachi Ltd’s 800 billion yen purchase of ABB Ltd’s power grid business is bigger than that. The Hitachi-ABB deal, while on the expensive side, is high-margin for the Japanese industrial conglomerate, and could ...