DURHAM – In 1842, the English social reformer Edwin Chadwick documented a 30-year discrepancy between the life expectancy of men in the poor…

NEW DELHI – The United States, still mired in a protracted war in Afghanistan that has exacted a staggering cost in blood and treasure, will…

CAMBRIDGE – A specter is haunting the world’s developing countries – the specter of the “informal” economy. For some, the informal sector in…

SINGAPORE – Among the stories and rumors prompted by Edward J. Snowden’s leaking of classified material – whistleblowing or treason, dependi…

NEW DELHI – As the West begins to gear up for the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Middle East is being convulsed as ne…

WASHINGTON, DC – On June 17, at his first press conference as Iran’s President-elect, Hassan Rowhani broke little new ground in the Islamic …

CAMBRIDGE – As a graduate student at MIT, I had the opportunity to work with Professors Robert Langer and Ram Sasisekharan in an environment…

AMMAN – The Internet has proved to be a powerful tool for overcoming media restrictions and censorship worldwide. But new restrictions on We…

NEW YORK – Almost immediately after the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were revealed to be immigrants, opponents of immigration re…

MEXICO CITY – Latin America and the United States have experienced what one could call a series of “marijuana moments” over the past few wee…

ROTTERDAM – People who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder (indicated by their level of education, occupation, or income) have shorter and…

COPENHAGEN – We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the C…

FRANKFURT – During the recent hearing on the constitutionality of the European Central Bank’s measures to prevent the eurozone from falling …

NEW DELHI – A casual reader of India’s newspapers for the last several weeks would be forgiven for wondering whether the country was suddenl…

NEW YORK – At this year’s International Monetary Fund/World Bank spring meetings in Washington, DC, the IMF urged European countries to ease…

ZURICH – It is all too easy to envy China. At current growth rates, the Chinese economy will double in size in only nine years, raising an e…

ATHENS – A visit to Greece leaves many vivid impressions. There are, of course, the country’s rich history, abundance of archeological sites…

ATHENS – The centrality of Germany to Europe and, more widely, to world affairs has been amply, and often bloodily, demonstrated over many c…

BASEL – The world’s central banks are engaged in one of the great policy experiments in modern history: ultra-easy money. And, as the experi…

CAMBRIDGE – It seems that austerity is out of fashion in the eurozone – at least for the moment. The European Commission has given Spain, Fr…

CONAKRY – In December 2010, I became President of Guinea following the country’s first truly open and democratic elections. I said then that…

VIENNA – The world faces two looming, interconnected energy challenges: how to provide reliable access to modern energy services to the one …

CAMBRIDGE – The term “currency wars” is a catchy way of saying “competitive devaluation.” In the wake of the sharp fall in the value of the …

LONDON – Governments around the world have just received one of the most important scientific reports ever written. It provides the starkest…

PARIS – In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the public’s trust alleviates pressure on the state, allowing it to funct…