NEWPORT BEACH – Some two years into Egypt’s grass-roots revolution, the country’s economy is in a worrisome downward spiral. A growing numbe…

CAMBRIDGE – Several of my Harvard University colleagues have recently been casualties in the crossfire between fiscal “austerians” and fisca…

PARIS – The demise of the Roman Empire resulted from a combination of strategic overreach and excessive delegation of security responsibilit…

MILAN – In a recent set of studies, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff used a vast array of historical data to show that the accumulation of…

ROME – For more than a decade, Asia’s economies have been on the move – and so have its people. The scale of migration from rural to urban a…

CANBERRA – The brouhaha over Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s article “Growth in a Time of Debt” may be the most conspicuous and incen…

BOSTON – If we want to understand what drove the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to terrorism, the answer …

PARIS – Today, roughly one-quarter of the world’s population lives in conflict-affected and fragile states. Despite vast sums of money spent…

MADRID – This month, an independent review panel is expected to release its findings regarding the World Bank’s Doing Business report. Specu…

EDMONTON – Calm discussion of the environment nowadays is about as plausible as reasoned dialogue on witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. C…

PRAGUE – We are all brought up to recycle paper to save trees. We get countless e-mail admonitions: “Please consider the environment before …

Editor’s note: On May 12, George Soros was awarded the Tiziano Terzani Prize for his 2012 book Financial Turmoil published in Italy by Hoepl…

CHICAGO – How long does it take to mourn the death of a loved one? The question is peculiar, even mildly offensive. Recovery from bereavemen…

PRINCETON – What began in Syria as a revolt against an oppressive regime has evolved into a sectarian civil war and, more recently, into a p…

SHANGHAI – When you think about centers of technological innovation, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Seoul are probably the first places that c…

NEW DELHI – The overwhelming victory of the Indian National Congress in elections in the important southern state of Karnataka in early May …

PARIS – At the end of 2011, sovereign-wealth funds’ assets under management amounted to $3 trillion, following 237 direct investments worth …

BRUSSELS – The recent abductions of Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and his Greek Orthodox counterpart, Paul Yazigi, reflect not …

ISTANBUL – A simplistic (actually, naive) view of markets is that they exist almost in a “state of nature,” and that the best of all worlds …

CAMBRIDGE – When the stakes are high, it is no surprise that battling political opponents use whatever support they can garner from economis…

WASHINGTON, DC – The rocket strikes that a militant Islamist group recently fired from the Egyptian Sinai into the Israeli city of Eilat ser…

ROME – In early 2012, outgoing World Bank President Robert Zoellick announced that the Millennium Development Goal of halving the global pov…

PRINCETON – When Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, went to Ukraine for talks last month, his Ukrainian counterparts reportedly l…

LONDON – Since the 1970’s, economists have warned that a monetary union could not be sustained without a fiscal union. But the eurozone’s le…

PARIS – “If the law supposes that,” says Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, “the law is a ass – a idiot.” For decades, Britain’s libel laws had bee…