It’s hard to escape a visit to India without someone asking you to compare it to China. This visit was no exception, but I think it’s more revealing to widen the aperture and compare India, China and Egypt. India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society, bubbling with elections and associations […]
Befitting an individual who will be turning 90 this year, Lee Kuan Yew is increasingly reflective these days—about his life, the memories that he shared with his wife of 60 years, and the lives that their three children have led. Unlike most his age, however, he is also preoccupied with the challenges that his country […]
With its civil lawsuit against credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s, the US Justice Department is embarking on one of the most aggressive efforts yet to hold Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis. Will anything change? Read Here – Christian Science Monitor
China‘s positive economic influence has been surging in surrounding countries over the past five years, as the nation overtook the United States to become the largest trading partner of 124 economies by 2011. The number was only 70 in 2006. The US may not be as thrilled. The country has seen a sharp decrease in […]
Two years ago this month, Burma’s current government took office amid broad international condemnation for the rigged election — replete with fraud and intimidation — that put it there. Despite this inauspicious start, Burma politics have opened in the last year and a half, and the country’s economy has liberalized more quickly than any other […]
The United States is on the threshold of comprehensive immigration reform. Between the president and the coalition in the Senate, it looks likely it will pass, which means that within a few years we shall have 11 million new Americans with full voting rights. What will their emergence from the shadows do to our economy? And, perhaps […]
You’ve pulled a nifty diplomatic hat trick when you convince your main competitor to blame himself for your bad behavior—and to consider canceling his opposition to that misbehavior to mollify you! Yet China might pull off such a feat if it protests so long and loudly against the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia that Washington […]
An inconvenient fact is that Indonesia’s economic growth is mainly driven by a commodity boom fuelled by China’s appetite for raw materials and global demand for biofuels. China’s enterprises are building bullet trains while Indian car– and IT-companies compete around the world. Indonesia, all the while, manufactures…essentially nothing. Most international manufacturing companies have moved on to greener […]
I ENCOUNTERED something on this trip to India that I had never met before: a whole new political community — India’s “virtual middle class.” Its emergence explains a lot about the rise of social protests here, as well as in places like China and Egypt. It is one of the most exciting things happening on […]
SMALLISH countries are often in the vanguard when it comes to reforming government. In the 1980s Britain was out in the lead, thanks to Thatcherism and privatisation. Tiny Singapore has long been a role model for many reformers. Now the Nordic countries are likely to assume a similar role. Read Here – The Economist
looking beyond borders 