Economics & Business Archive

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was in Washington last week for talks with U.S. President Barack Obama. The visit came in the wake of Obama’s executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and his decision to loosen the decades-old embargo on Cuba, both of which won him favor in Mexico and across Latin America. Meanwhile, Pena Nieto has faced a difficult six months, following the massacre of 43 students in the southern city of Iguala and a series of scandals relating to railway contracts and his wife’s mansion. Immigration was at the top of the agenda, with Pena […]

Earlier this month Venezuela and Ecuador received major boosts from China, which has redoubled its stake in the two Latin American economies most vulnerable to plunging oil prices. Following recent visits to China by financial chiefs from both countries, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Rafael Correa, each traveled to Beijing in early January, where China held its first annual ministerial meeting with the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC). Correa returned from the visit with approximately $5.3 billion in new financing from the Export-Import Bank of China; Maduro announced that Venezuela would receive an additional […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looks at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II will focus on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Tunisians are making history again. The birthplace of the Arab Spring seems to be setting itself up to be the home of Arab democracy, pluralism and peaceful transition—and a model for the entire Arab world. Last month, for the first time since its independence from France in 1956, Tunisia successfully held competitive parliamentary and presidential elections—praised by […]

When Oman’s foreign minister made two visits to India last year, once before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government was sworn in and once right after, it became the first Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member to commence high-level engagement with the new Indian government. The visits were also a signal that Oman continues to be India’s closest strategic partner in West Asia. As a country that not only hosts some 700,000 Indian expatriates, but also key Indian listening facilities, Oman is assuming ever-greater importance for New Dehli as an outpost to project Indian influence—especially with the rise of the […]

U.S. President Barack Obama has returned from his holiday vacation in Hawaii to start a “barnstorming” tour across the United States to make the case for his domestic policy agenda in the run-up to the State of the Union address on Jan. 20. Faced with a new Republican-controlled Congress that will not be particularly hospitable to his proposals, Obama is likely to emphasize his core domestic priorities. When he does return to foreign policy matters after the address, Obama, like other “fourth quarter” presidents before him, will likely begin to sort the issues facing him in his last two years […]

In a reversal of historical trends, emerging countries are now going to great lengths to buy into portions of Europe’s sluggish industrial system. In the gloomy context of an old continent struggling to overcome the crisis that has been gripping its economies since 2007, businesses from developing nations are queuing to purchase valuable European assets, often in countries that were once their colonial rulers. As a consequence of the growing importance that their own countries have gained on the world stage, private and public managers from China, India and the Persian Gulf countries are now familiar figures in the governing […]

On Jan. 1, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flagship geopolitical project, the Eurasian Union, formally came into existence. Building on the existing Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the Eurasian Union’s official goals are to enhance its members’ economic prosperity and political influence by promoting the free flow of capital, goods, labor and services, and by coordinating their agricultural, energy, industrial and transportation sectors. Back in the fall of 2011, when still prime minister, Putin made establishing a Eurasian Union among the former Soviet republics a major theme of his successful presidential campaign. He argued that by coordinating their […]

The open feuding within Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, intensified last month, as rivals battled over the succession to 90-year-old President Robert Mugabe. This culminated in the dismissal by Mugabe of Vice President Joice Mujuru and her allies in the Cabinet, a move that handed Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa the advantage in the succession race. Mnangagwa benefited from the support of the president’s wife, Grace Mugabe. With Mujuru apparently neutralized, the question is whether that alliance will hold, or whether it will be undermined by rival ambitions. The purge of December 2014 still leaves a whole host of issues unresolved in […]

When diplomats want to explore a way out of a crisis, they like to talk about striking a “grand bargain” and try to avoid the word “climb-down,” which tends to imply an acknowledgement of failure or defeat. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States, trapped in costly confrontations over Syria and Ukraine, may need to agree to a sort of “grand climb-down” that allows the two powers to get out of unsustainable positions as painlessly as possible. Moscow and Washington both begin 2015 stuck with the consequences of poor strategic bets. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine now looks like a truly disastrous […]