HER voice is high and birdlike. Tiny, she is fond of finger wagging. Her party, the Trinamool Congress, has just 19 of the national parliament’s 543 elected members. She offers little beyond vague talk of the “common man”, and after a year running West Bengal she looks ill-at-ease in office. Yet Mamata Banerjee feels she […]
The fight against Somali-based pirates is becoming a private battle as global defence cuts reduce naval counter-piracy deployments. Because governments have struggled to contain the spread of piracy in the Indian Ocean, shipping companies have turned to private military security companies to guarantee the safety of their crews and cargo. Private armed teams have proliferated […]
The situation in East Asia is tense. Japan and China, two of the most powerful countries in the world, are locked in a bitter dispute over eight tiny, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. The volatility of the issue — compounded by the fact that the waters around the islands are rich in natural resources — is […]
A strong argument in favour of FDI in mammoth retail is that it will generate employment. Surely, it will. But we can’t let the question lie there. We must ask, for whom? Will it source employees from the unskilled, illiterate vegetable vendors who, akin to a capillary network, are spread across the length and breadth […]
When the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt, there was fear that draconian social measures would be pursued, thereby killing the country’s important tourism industry. Instead, the party has attempted to portray a moderate face, and more aggressively, tout itself as an administration willing to cut lucrative deals. While the politics of the Brotherhood remain […]
It is the mark of science and perhaps rational thought to operate with a falsifiable understanding of how the world works. So it is fair to ask economists a fundamental question: what could happen that would cause you to revise your views of how the economy operates and acknowledge that the model you had been […]
Four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the near-total paralysis of capitalism’s central nervous system — the moment fear completely overwhelmed greed on Wall Street — we are starting to see a few glimmers of hope. The good news: Several big banks have finally started taking steps to reform Wall Street’s out-of-control […]
It is true that foreigners are never really viewed as Chinese. The sooner foreigners accept that, and learn what limitations that means, the faster they can focus on building profitable businesses. Few foreigners have lived in China for decades (even five years is considered a long time by many), so most are viewed as vagabonds […]
With the euro in crisis, Germany has come to seem like a lone island of fiscal stability in Europe. Its debt levels are modest, its government bonds are safe havens for investors around the world, and it has avoided the kinds of private credit booms and housing bubbles that have destabilized the rest of the […]
Across Africa, oil, gas and minerals are being discovered more often than ever before. Nowhere is the global commodities boom being felt more acutely. Over the next decade, billions of dollars will flow into countries previously starved of financial capital, Kofi Annan writes. Read Here – International Herald Tribune
