Economics & Business Archive

Making sense of the world these days can be daunting. Across a swath of wildly disparate countries in the Middle East and South America, popular protests have shaken the foundations of both democratic governments and dictatorships alike. Western democracies haven’t been immune to these systemic shocks, ranging from resurgent—and in some cases triumphant—populist movements to repeatedly inconclusive elections and precarious governing coalitions. All this upheaval has called into question the tenets of the liberal international order that have guided global elites and policymakers over the past three decades. At first glance, it would seem we have entered a new historical […]

At midnight on Nov. 15, Iran’s government announced a precipitous 300 percent hike in fuel prices. Immediate public outcries quickly escalated into nationwide protests that spread to more than 100 cities and gripped the country for 6 straight days, before the authorities effectively crushed them. Since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in August 2018 and reimposed unilateral sanctions, the Iranian economy has been charting difficult waters. President Hassan Rouhani admitted as much recently when he exhorted lawmakers to reduce fuel subsidies in the face of plummeting oil revenues, saying that “Iran is experiencing […]

In the fall of 1989, the British economist John Williamson prepared a background paper for an upcoming conference at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington, the aim of which was to examine recent shifts in economic policies and attitudes in Latin America. By his own account, his aim with the paper was to identify a list of 10 policies “about whose proper deployment Washington can muster a reasonable degree of consensus.” Little did he know at the time that his so-called Washington Consensus would come to take on a life of its own. Thirty years later, it remains […]

ARAWA, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea—In late October, under overcast skies, a reggae band played to a crowd of several hundred people of all ages at an outdoor stage in Arawa, an old mining town framed by rainforest-covered mountains in the center of Bougainville Island. The crowd gradually grew as people, laden with bags of fresh produce, walked over from the large fruit and vegetable market situated directly opposite. The scene could have been confused for a music festival, but the band was only a warm-up act for the day’s main event: a political rally in favor of independence for Bougainville, […]

When President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal last year and reimposed economic sanctions on Tehran, he justified it on the basis that the agreement did not go far enough to keep Iran from permanently acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet rather than give in to Trump’s pressure, Iran is responding by restarting nuclear activities that the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, had successfully frozen. Trump and others in his administration haven’t just focused on Iran’s nuclear program, though, pointing to other issues of concern with Tehran, including its missile tests, support […]

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador entered office nearly a year ago promising “profound and radical” change to just about everything in Mexico. One of his main targets was the country’s energy sector, which had been overhauled and opened up to private investment for the first time in many decades by his predecessor, Enrique Pena Nieto, in a sweeping 2013 reform. So far AMLO, as Lopez Obrador is widely known in Mexico, has not reversed that energy market liberalization, which he strongly opposed. But he has sought to chip away at it. Those efforts could have dire implications for the expansion […]

In late October, the Trump administration announced the suspension of more than $1 billion in trade preferences for Thailand’s fishing industry due to rampant violations of human rights, particularly among migrant laborers who work in the sector. Thailand is one of the world’s largest seafood exporters, but its fishing industry has long been dogged by reports of slave labor, trafficking and other human rights abuses. While Thailand has made some progress in addressing these issues, it still has not implemented necessary reforms, says Steve Trent, founder and executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, a British watchdog organization. In an […]

Since 2001, member states of the World Trade Organization have held on-and-off negotiations on an agreement to end harmful subsidies to fisheries that are contributing to the depletion of fish stocks around the world. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in 2015, only two-thirds of the world’s fish stocks were being harvested at sustainable levels, down from 90 percent in 1974. Although the WTO is close to an agreement, it won’t meet a year-end deadline proposed by the U.N. In an email interview with WPR, Daniel Skerritt, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Fisheries Economics Research Unit […]

If all had gone as planned this past weekend, President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping might have signed the “phase one” trade agreement that Trump billed as “the greatest and biggest deal ever made for our Great Patriot Farmers in the history of our Country.” The two leaders had been scheduled to meet and discuss the deal in Santiago, Chile, during the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. But with street protests over economic policy and inequality rocking Chile, President Sebastian Pinera canceled the summit late last month, citing the “difficult circumstances” in the country and the priority of […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Neil Bhatiya is filling in for Candace Rondeaux this week. President Donald Trump this week laid out his most direct case yet for staying the course in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, he boasted that his “America First” policies had delivered stronger-than-expected economic growth and new jobs for millions of Americans, despite the disruption caused not only by his trade war with China, but also by the tariffs he has imposed on close U.S. allies in Europe. While most coverage of […]

In October 2017, an unlikely pair of Saudi expatriates began exchanging messages on WhatsApp. Omar Abdulaziz was a dissident YouTuber in Canada in his 20s, well-known for his satirical videos that mocked the Saudi leadership. Jamal Khashoggi, 30 years older and more of a moderate, was a prominent Saudi journalist who had grown increasingly alarmed by the kingdom’s crackdown on dissent. Having gone into self-imposed exile in Washington in June 2017, Khashoggi used his newfound perch as a Washington Post columnist to criticize the worsening human rights situation under Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince and de facto […]

President Donald Trump can point to a handful of trade deals he has concluded since coming to office. What he cannot claim, though, is that he has made things better. New agreements with Canada, Mexico and Japan do not come close to offsetting the market access that was lost when Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. Americans also continue to pay higher tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in imports from China, the European Union and a range other countries, while U.S. exporters are facing retaliatory tariffs in major markets. A “phase one” agreement with China is […]

Rising seas will endanger more than 300 million people in the next 30 years, according to a startling new study published in late October in the journal Nature Communications. By 2050, the impact of rising sea levels will be much more severe than previously thought, “threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities” in low-lying areas from Egypt’s Nile Delta to southern and eastern China to Southeast Asia, as The New York Times put it. One of those cities is Ho Chi Minh City, the economic hub of Vietnam, which could be underwater along with the […]

The restive coastal province of Cabo Delgado in northeastern Mozambique doesn’t often make international headlines. Before the surprise discovery in 2011 of what is believed to be one of the world’s largest offshore natural gas reserves, Cabo Delgado was a sleepy little getaway mostly known for its quiet beach towns. That changed late last week when militants from a newly formed branch of the Islamic State reportedly killed seven Russian soldiers believed to be fighting on behalf of the Wagner Group, the shadowy, Kremlin-backed private military contractor. In some ways, the fact that an energy-rich part of East Africa riven […]

Two years after the military coup that removed Robert Mugabe from power, Zimbabwe has entered a new spiral of decline that threatens to take the country back to the worst days of his era. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power in that coup, had promised a “new beginning” for Zimbabwe. That initially bought him some valuable breathing space, and even goodwill from the international community, which seemed willing to give him an opportunity to make good on his pledge. It hasn’t taken long for the euphoria—always rooted more in the demise of Mugabe than in the rise of Mnangagwa—to […]

If climate change is the most important matter of common concern around the world, what comes second? Perhaps nothing close. But by my lights, the usual looming questions—about the fate of American power and influence, Brexit, the related viability of the European Union, and the many uncertainties surrounding the rise of China—seem almost parochial in comparison to one that gets immeasurably less international attention: the future of employment in Africa, where unprecedented demographic transitions are underway. Based on current projections, the continent’s population of nearly 1.2 billion people will rise to 2.5 billion by the middle of this century—more than […]

If someone had mentioned fentanyl to you 5 or 10 years ago, you might have scratched your head. But today, this synthetic opioid has become a household word in the worst sense imaginable. It’s cheap and easy to manufacture, while being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. And it’s the most commonly identified drug in fatal overdoses in the United States. For this week’s interview on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Ben Westhoff, a journalist who spent the past few years chronicling the rise of fentanyl for a new book, […]