Economics & Business Archive

As the Middle East undergoes historic changes, Saudi Arabia continues to gradually shift its foreign and defense policies to reflect both new realities in its region and changes in the global landscape. The two main components of this shift include an ongoing effort to deter Iran and enhance stability among its regional allies through a sizable buildup of its conventional military forces, including a proposed record $90 billion arms sale from the United States, and a broadening of its economic and political ties with emerging global powers such as China and India. Ties between Saudi Arabia and its longtime backer […]

I had the pleasure of participating in France 24’s panel discussion program, The World This Week, last Friday. The other panelists were Paris Match’s Régis Le Sommelier, France 24’s Annette Young and Global Post’s Mildrade Cherfils. Topics included the News of the World scandal, the U.S. and European debt crises, and the Libya war. Part one can be seen here. Part two can be seen here.

Brazil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega recently told the Financial Times that the global currency war “was absolutely not over,” and cited two countries that, according to him, have not ceased the hostilities: China and the United States. More and more, Brazil seems to be caught between — and battling against — the greenback and the yuan in its efforts to slow the rise in value of its own currency, the real. Part of the problem is due to the disparity in how the United States and China have bounced back from the 2008 global financial crisis. Economic recovery in the […]

The exodus of Somali refugees into Kenya and Ethiopia is getting worse by the day. Most arrive exhausted. Over 8,500 Somalis have come to Kenya since the beginning of July and 11,000 have gone to Ethiopia.

China’s foreign reserves have risen to almost 3.2 trillion U.S. dollars, the Central Bank said in a report on Tuesday.

On June 26, at a gathering in Kabul marking World Counter Narcotics Day, the mood was somber. Gone was the positive spin of last year’s event, when Afghanistan’s minister of counternarcotics, Zarar Ahmad Moqbil, proudly announced that poppy cultivation had been reduced by up to 50 percent and that 23 out of 34 provinces were then free from poppy cultivation. Sadly, the significant decrease in opium production last year has since been attributed to a convergence of environmental and climatic variables that devastated the crops late in the season, not to effective counternarcotics measures. According to the United Nations, Afghanistan […]

A century ago, Argentina was one of the world’s richest countries. Since then, Buenos Aires has given the world a primer on how to derail, disrupt and mismanage economic growth, with successive governments finding new and creative ways to stop prosperity in its tracks. Now President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is adding a page to the nation’s playbook, and this time, the main theme is deliberate denial of reality. With the specter of inflation threatening to overheat and burn Argentina’s economic recovery, Fernandez enacted a most peculiar strategy to combat the problem: denying there is one. In recent years, the […]

The announcement this week that Israel’s cabinet approved a new maritime demarcation agreement with Cyprus may pave the way for Israel to start tapping prized offshore oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. But it also exacerbates an already tense geopolitical standoff between Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and Cyprus surrounding the energy reserves, which, though relatively small compared to those in the Persian Gulf, are estimated to be worth billions. “You’ve got all the ingredients for a problem,” says James M. Dorsey, a World Politics Review contributor and senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. […]

Guatemala is confronting numerous problems as it prepares for presidential elections scheduled for Sept. 11. Organized criminal groups have made parts of the country all but lawless. Corruption and poverty remain widespread. Frequent natural disasters have strained state capacity. Even the preparations for the elections themselves have been plagued by political violence, with two dozen political workers killed in 2011 alone. But one problem has yet to become a major feature of the presidential campaign, despite its gravity: food insecurity, which threatens millions in Guatemala. With food prices rising globally, social upheaval over increasingly expensive basic staples has become more […]

In 1999, Amartya Sen, an Indian economist who a year earlier had won the Nobel Prize for Economics, published “Development as Freedom.” Sen mapped out two arguments for a general audience. First, he defined economic development as the expansion of individual freedom, challenging “narrower” views that reduced development to GNP growth or a rise in personal incomes. Sen’s ideas spurred the creation of the U.N. Human Development Index, which created a composite measure of development that included income, health and education. Second, Sen maintained that democratic political arrangements, defined as the existence of civil and political freedoms, were necessary to […]

KIGALI, Rwanda — Young, radiant and eloquent, Clare Akamanzi is anything but modest as she outlines her government’s plans for Rwanda’s future. As chief operating officer of the Rwanda Development Board, an institution mandated with fast-tracking private sector growth, Akamanzi is a rising star among Rwanda’s best and brightest and the day-to-day brains behind one of the boldest development visions on the planet. Here, in this former conflict-ridden backwater best known to the world for its grisly 1994 genocide, officials are determined to forge Africa’s first knowledge-based society — turning away from small-scale agriculture and embracing services like information and […]

A former resident of Addis Ababa returning today after an absence of five years would find the city almost unrecognizable. In that time, Ethiopia has transformed itself economically, and nowhere is that transformation more on display than in its capital. In terms of infrastructure and housing, Addis Ababa has blossomed from perhaps Africa’s worst example of urban planning into a grid of paved streets and multilane ring roads, with corresponding glass-walled high rises and luxury villas comparable to Johannesburg, South Africa. The Ethiopian government has used its unlimited power to bulldoze whole neighborhoods, evicting residents with little notice or compensation […]

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao traveled to Germany late last month, where he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and signed several major trade deals. In an email interview, Gudrun Wacker, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, discussed China-Germany relations. WPR: What is the recent history of China-Germany diplomatic and trade relations? Gudrun Wacker: When Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao came to Germany in June, he was accompanied by 13 cabinet ministers for the first-ever German-Chinese intergovernmental consultations. Germany has conducted such talks with very few countries in the world. These consultations reflect the importance of […]

Here lies the space shuttle. She kept the U.S. human spaceflight program alive after the euphoria of the Apollo missions. She led the way to reusable space flight. She provided jobs for armies of engineers and technicians. She also made human spaceflight seem routine — and in the end, that’s what killed her. But as with the retirement of the Apollo program — which was accompanied by less hand-wringing and fewer tears shed than that of the shuttle — it is time, not to mourn the shuttle’s passing, but to support the innovation that NASA and, more importantly, American industry […]

The sense of ideological triumphalism with which China recently celebrated the 90th anniversary of Communist Party rule echoed a flood of recent books and analyses in the West that have readily embraced that same sentiment. Nevertheless, there is a growing mountain of evidence that suggests China’s “unprecedented” economic accomplishments are far less impressive than popularly imagined. And with the region’s “demographic dividend” already shifting from China to both India and Southeast Asia, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Beijing — and the world — is just one financial crisis away from finding the “superiority” of state capitalism revealed […]

Tensions continue to grow over a territorial dispute in the South China Sea between Beijing and its Southeast Asian neighbors. Some experts contend the long-standing dispute could be resolved by a treaty.

After seven years of debate and impasse, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 46-nation group of nuclear technology suppliers, agreed at a meeting last month in the Netherlands to revise the guidelines for trade in enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technology. The move was immediately criticized in India by the media and opposition parties as a reversal of the NSG’s 2008 waiver allowing the transfer to India of sensitive ENR technology, which can be used for the production of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. The NSG’s original guidelines dated from 1978, three years after the group was formed in response to […]