If the Trump presidency and Brexit convinced the European Union to start acting more like a sovereign power and less like a supermarket, Covid-19 has shown there’s a depressingly long journey ahead. First there was fighting over protective medical equipment. Then the bungled start to its vaccine rollout. Now the scale of the bloc’s dependence on the US and Asia ...

When Covid-19 first plunged Europe into lockdown last spring, there were plausible predictions of a tidal wave of corporate insolvencies. That hasn’t happened, at least not yet. The number of companies declaring bankruptcy declined by about a fifth in the euro area last year, even as economic output contracted more than 6%. Firms were saved by overwhelming government support, including ...

It hasn’t been an edifying few days for Hong Kong. After a domestic worker from the Philippines was found late last week to have contracted a more infectious strain of Covid-19 locally, all 370,000 foreign women working in the territory’s homes were ordered to take coronavirus tests, many queueing for hours over the weekend to do so. They faced the ...