Economics

The most notable thing is not what has happened, but what has not happened.  The market has not responded to the soft Chinese data over the weekend.  Chinese equities began softer but recovered fully and the Shanghai Composite closed on...

The Great Financial Crisis has exposed a deep chasm in economics and economic policy.  In no single institution is this crystallized more than at the Bank of Japan.  The former Governor, Shirakawa brought policy rates to nearly zero to combat...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a report on global corruption this week. In it, the international finance organization reported that almost $2 trillion worth of public works projects, permits for private work, and other transactions in countries around the...

On 29 January 2016, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) announced its monetary policy for the New Year: quantitative and qualitative monetary easing with a negative interest rate. The policy came as a surprise to money markets. The Nikkei index went...

360b / Shutterstock.com 360b / Shutterstock.com Whether or not David Cameron, the UK prime minister, was right to tell the Queen so publicly that guests of the country were leaders of “possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world”,...

    As we approach the UN International Day of Families, only the foolhardy would try to predict the future of family groups. Previous attempts have, in fact, failed. William J Goode, writing in the early 1960s during the “golden age...

Dramatic declines in commercial real estate soured GDP growth in the first quarter, leading to speculation that the Federal Reserve will delay raising interest rates.  Analysts are growing increasingly confident that the Fed will delay its rate hike, with a...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is the parent organization for the International Energy Agency (IEA). The two bodies have apparently been locked in an internal feud for years, and this dispute has finally led the two bodies...

In both the US and the UK, politicians are using racial smears and anti-Muslim rhetoric to try to gain white votes. However, the strategy carries risks in increasingly multi-cultural societies. Within days of his election last week as London mayor,...

Four years ago, voluntary guidelines on the governance of land and land tenure were agreed at the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. This was a response to growing concerns about the impacts of “land grabbing” driven by the...

Recent decades have witnessed a growing trend towards regional economic integration. As of February 2016, some 625 notifications of regional trade agreements had been received by the WTO and of these, 419 were in force. However, South Asia is still...

Concerned about protecting the rights of long ostracized groups that are, just now, beginning to gain legal and cultural recognition around the world, the World Bank Group announced plans to protect the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex...

In the first two years of the Modi government, India and the United States have taken calibrated efforts at the highest political level to transform bilateral relations. It was in this context that the visit of United States Defense Secretary...

ASEAN+3 (the ASEAN members plus China, South Korea and Japan) was born from the ashes of the Asian financial crisis and the IMF’s response to it. It’s no secret that displeasure — if not hostility — to the policy prescriptions...

Total nonfarm payrolls rose 160,000 in April, far short of the 202,000 consensus expectations from economists and a steep decline from the 208,000 jobs gained in March. "Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, and financial activities....