Economics & Business Archive

Anyone trying to understand Latin American politics should pay close attention to urban areas. Of the 600 million people in the southern part of the Americas, 80 percent now live in cities. However, old narratives die hard, which explains why English-speaking articles about Latin America still disproportionately focus on rural issues, peasant struggles, land reform and related topics. Of course, these issues remain relevant, because land ownership, rural or urban, is still a major source of conflict. But it is clear that urban issues will increasingly dominate the region’s political future. Take for instance Venezuela, the most polarized—not to say […]

A little over a year ago, Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, weighed in on the most pressing political challenge facing Astana at the time: whether or not to change the country’s name. Before any consensus could be reached, however, unidentified men cropped up in Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, saying little and admitting less. Twelve months later, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and amid an intermittent war in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and the central government in Kiev, it’s clear that the status quo ante will not return. In just a year, Kazakhstan’s geopolitical environs have shifted more rapidly than at any […]

For all the frustration and anger surrounding the recent negotiations between Greece and its international creditors, the parties reached a temporary, four-month accommodation that provides a clear sign that both sides still want a durable agreement. They all have good reason to do so, too. Not only does each nation have narrow interests that favor an intact eurozone, but, despite more sanguine accounts of the situation, they all realize how failure risks a destructive financial contagion. That is because the primary risks across the eurozone have shifted from the borrowing costs on sovereign debt to the danger of capital flight […]

Last weekend, the Iraqi government reopened the country’s national museum in Baghdad 12 years after it was looted during the U.S.-led invasion. The unexpectedly early reopening was a small act of defiance after militants of the self-declared Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS, released a propaganda video showing a rampage through the Mosul Museum. Some of the objects destroyed by the extremists in Mosul were plaster reproductions, and when toppled over smashed quickly in a cloud of dust. But others were ancient limestone originals, millennia-old, struck with sledgehammers and jackhammers. The museum houses a vast collection of antiquities from […]

After a string of scandals throughout 2014, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s corruption-related troubles haven’t let up this year. A high-profile former governor with close ties to Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has had his vast collection of luxury real estate in the United States revealed, prompting accusations of impropriety, while another former governor is under investigation for embezzling millions of dollars of public funds. The latest examples of graft and perceived conflicts of interest help explain why Mexico still lags behind Chile, Colombia and Brazil, three of Latin America’s most developed economies, in Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption […]

Diplomacy has always had a long, hard slog in the effort to find a settlement of the Iranian nuclear question. That slog hit its latest obstacle yesterday: With the U.S. and its negotiating partners in the final stretch of trying to hammer out an agreement with Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress in an attempt to derail the deal. That there is even the possibility of a deal for Netanyahu to derail is itself something of a testament to the negotiators’ Herculean efforts, given the initially diametrically opposed preferences of the two main interlocutors, the Islamic […]

Last week Greece received a four-month extension of its $277 billion bailout program. The parliaments of Finland, Estonia and, most importantly, Germany, as well as Greece’s other EU partners, approved the bailout program that was agreed to Feb. 20, provided that Greece submit a list of planned reforms. Greece submitted six pages of reforms last Monday, but not all of Greece’s creditors think they are sufficient. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), wrote a letter to Dutch Finance Minster Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who is also president of the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, expressing her concern that […]

Last month, Ibrahim Ghandour, the chief assistant to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and the country’s foreign minister, Ali Karti, were both in Washington, the highest-level visit to the United States by Sudanese officials in decades. Their aim was to persuade the U.S. to lift financial sanctions and help ease relief of the country’s crippling $40 billion external debt. They won a gesture, as U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration relaxed communications sanctions to allow the export of smartphones, computers, radios and other devices to Sudan. Normalization of relations with Washington is Khartoum’s enduring foreign policy challenge. It has eluded Bashir since […]