Despite the obvious public health benefits of suspending the umrah and hajj, Saudi Arabia will pay a heavy cost for its prudence. Pilgrims bring in billions of dollars to the country every year, so the Saudi economy will suffer as long as the crisis lasts. Another loss is less quantifiable, but just as significant: pilgrimage […]
President Donald Trump is squabbling with governors and calling on a new council of corporate executives as he tries to reopen the American economy as quickly as possible. But his powers are limited not just by the Constitution but by the fact that he has limited sway over the real economy. Read Here – Politico
Why has the WHO failed so miserably in tackling the coronavirus crisis? The answer is in the acronym. The key problem at the WHO isn’t corruption or mismanagement, though the WHO has a terrible track record on both. It’s “who” is at the top: director-general Tedros Adhanom. Read Here – The National Interest Also Read: […]
Two months ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping looked like he would emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic with his legitimacy and his ambitions for Chinese global leadership in tatters. Today, as the Chinese government lifts its lockdown on the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, Xi can present himself instead as a forceful […]
An economy without crowds is not a “new normal.” It may be more like the new anomie, to borrow Émile Durkheim’s term for the sense of disconnectedness. For most people, the word “fun” is almost synonymous with “crowd.” The coming year will be a time of depression in the psychological as well as the economic […]
Under the assumption that the pandemic and required containment peaks in the second quarter for most countries in the world, and recedes in the second half of this year, in the April World Economic Outlook we project global growth in 2020 to fall to -3 percent. This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, […]
COVID-19 is an international scourge of misery, pain, and trauma… The disease is the very definition of a global problem: it doesn’t respect borders, spreads on human contact, and turns airplanes, trains, and automobiles into carriers of the contagion. Yet despite the speed with which the coronavirus has levelled the world economy and shuttered some […]
The coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping across the world is more than a public health emergency. It poses unprecedented threats to national and international security, and fighting it, as the leaders of several countries have stressed, will resemble a major war involving similar numbers of fatalities. Intelligence services will have a major role in this struggle, just as they have in previous […]
Over recent weeks, the United States and China have been using increasingly strong rhetoric around COVID-19. The war of words had real-life consequences in late March when a meeting of the G7 failed to agree a joint statement following US State Department’s insistence on referring to the virus as the “Wuhan Virus”. How have the two […]
There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen… Read Here – Marginal Revolution
looking beyond borders 