Economics & Business Archive

In eastern Mediterranean politics, it used to be Turkey and Israel versus Greece and Cyprus. Now it’s Israel, Cyprus and Greece versus Turkey. This formulation is certainly exaggerated, but Israel and Cyprus do appear to be strengthening their ties, as represented by President Nicos Anastasiades’ visit to Jerusalem last month. The shift is reflective of changed regional conditions in both the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East at large, as well as within the countries themselves, particularly Turkey. In the mid-1990s, Turkey and Israel drew closer because of shared regional threats and challenges from Iraq, Syria and Iran, with a particular […]

June 2010, a start-up company in the Bay Area launched a new service to match riders with taxi cabs via a smartphone app. Today, just five years later, Uber operates in over 58 countries and 300 cities. Venture capitalists as well as investors such as Goldman Sachs, Google and the Chinese company Baidu have all poured in capital, with the company currently valued at $41 billion dollars. And even as it encounters violent protests in Paris and legal crackdowns elsewhere, Uber seems poised for still more growth. Some estimate that the company will generate revenues of $10 billion by the […]

If ambitious aliens reached Earth tomorrow, they might conclude that the planet is too troublesome to bother conquering: The world looks like an ungovernable place. The European Union faces an ever-intensifying crisis over Greece. Arab powers and their Western allies are struggling to keep up with terrorist attacks and atrocities by the Islamic State. The U.S. military reported last week that Russian and Chinese assertiveness now makes the chance of great-power war “low but growing.” Can these crises be defused? The answer may lie in Vienna, where talks on an Iranian nuclear deal are coming to a head, after widely […]

With water scarcity increasing political tension and threatening economic instability in countries across the world, transboundary water disputes often become highly charged and bitterly divisive. A prominent example has been the Nile basin in northeast Africa, where the nations sharing the Nile’s waters have for years sparred over their usage allotments amid concerns that upstream countries may interfere with water flow into downstream countries. Most recently, the region’s flashpoint for transboundary water conflict has been Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam, which within several years will stretch across the Blue Nile at the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. The controversial project has […]

It seems a little odd that the final countdown to a Greek default saw the clock run out on what was in reality a puny payment. Greece was due to pay the International Monetary Fund a mere 1.55 billion euros Tuesday, by itself a rather inconsequential sum in the global credit markets. Athens’ inability to pay that small amount set off the chain of events that put global markets on high alert and continues to threaten the decades-old project of European integration. While Greece has held testy exchanges with creditors from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central […]

The Greek debt crisis entered uncharted waters this week, as Athens defaulted on an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan after negotiations with its international creditors to extend its bailout program broke down. This report collects World Politic Review’s coverage of the crisis, from its origins in 2010 to the final days of the negotiations. For the next two weeks, all of the articles linked below are free for non-subscribers. From Crisis to Contagion In October 2009, the newly elected government of then-Prime Minister George Papandreou revealed that Greece’s budget deficit was far greater than previously acknowledged. The announcement caused the […]