Commentary archive

  • Portrait of Kanayo F. Nwanze

    Harnessing the Remittance Boom

    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…

  • Portrait of Michael Spence

    Learning About Growth from Austerity

    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…

  • Portrait of Barry Eichengreen

    Open-Access Economics

    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…

  • Portrait of Liah Greenfeld

    Nationalism, Madness, and Terrorism

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

  • Portrait of Erik Solheim

    A New Deal for Fragile States

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

  • Portrait of Ana Palacio

    The Importance of Doing Business

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

  • Portrait of Randall Morck

    Oily Dirt

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

  • Portrait of Bjørn Lomborg

    Hugging a Burning Tree

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

  • Portrait of George Soros

    The Resistible Fall of Europe: An Interview with George Soros

    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…

  • Portrait of Christopher Lane

    The Distortion of Grief

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

  • Portrait of Bernard Haykel

    Syria’s Sectarian Stalemate

    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…

  • Portrait of Richard Cooper

    China’s E-Tail Revolution

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

  • Portrait of Shashi Tharoor

    The Resurrection of Congress

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

  • Portrait of Emmanuel Guerin

    Green Sovereign Wealth

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

  • Portrait of Fiorello Provera

    The Endangered Arab Christian

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

  • Portrait of Kemal Derviş

    Balancing the Technocrats

    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 …

  • Portrait of Tamara Wittes

    The Egypt-Israel Peace Test

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

  • Portrait of Dani Rodrik

    What Use Are Economists?

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

  • Portrait of Jomo Kwame Sundaram

    The Mismeasure of Poverty

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

  • Portrait of Aryeh Neier

    Less of an Ass

    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…

  • Portrait of Paul De Grauwe

    Debt Without Drowning

    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…

  • Portrait of Peter Singer

    Why Pay More?

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

  • Portrait of H. T. Goranson

    The Curing Machine

    VIRGINIA BEACH – Last year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for a discovery that took 44 years to develop, and involved two differen…

  • Portrait of Adeel Malik

    An Arab Marshall Plan

    OXFORD – The wave of revolts that swept across the Arab world two years ago were fueled by demands for freedom, bread, and social justice. B…

  • Portrait of Javier DeFelipe

    Clearing A Path Through the Brain

    MADRID – Our brains are like a dense forest – a complex, seemingly impenetrable terrain of interacting neurons that mediates cognition and b…

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