As anyone who’s attended an Indian wedding knows, we far too often leave vital organizational tasks till the last minute, then tackle them all in an enormous, frenetic rush. The countdown to the 1 July deadline for the introduction of India’s new goods and services tax, or GST, feels a lot like that. This is perhaps India’s most comprehensive and …

It took S&P Global Ratings five extra years of hand-wringing to acknowledge that Indonesian sovereign debt was investment grade. Now that it has, expect the ripples to be felt in places other than the bond market. Fitch Ratings gave the Southeast Asian nation the all-important upgrade in December 2011. That was 14 years after the Asian crisis led 59 percent …

When it comes to productivity, only two things are undebatable: that the official rate of US productivity growth has stalled since at least 2007, having started to slow before then, and that there is no consensus about why or what to do about it. There is, additionally, some broad consensus that without stronger productivity growth going forward, standards of living …