Why is this boom happening? That’s an almost impossible question to answer. Fundamentally, economists don’t know why booms happen. It’s possible that there’s not even such a thing as a “boom” at all — that this is just how the economy works under normal circumstances, when there isn’t a recession or crisis to throw it off […]
As the only advanced industrial democracy that has closed its borders to unskilled migrant labor since the end of World War II, Japan has long been viewed as hostile to immigration. Although the number of foreign nationals in Japan has grown at a rapid pace in recent years—from 850,000 in 1985 to almost 2.6 million in 2017—foreign residents still make […]
One inconvenient feature of the global trading system is that efforts to protect the jobs of voting workers in one country risk affecting jobs, and perhaps votes, in another. Thus President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported aluminium and steel, offered with the rationale that American metalworkers had been losing jobs to foreign competition, alarmed […]
Like any president, Trump is taking credit for good economic news. He’s highlighted rising stocks and falling unemployment. But Trump also, famously, regards trade deficits as a sign of economic weakness. And for people who worry about the fact that the U.S. buys more stuff from other countries than it sells them, the news has […]
Recent protests in numerous Iranian cities and towns caught the world by surprise, and embarrassed Iran’s government and ruling political establishment. But the expectation that the protests would escalate into a popular uprising and unravel the Islamic Republic did not come to pass. Iran’s rulers could take heart from that, but they cannot avoid the […]
Saudi Arabia laid out the biggest spending plan in the kingdom’s history in absolute terms when the government published its 2018 budget in late December. After two years of austerity measures and budget deficits following the oil price dive in 2014, the sizeable amount of slated expenditures for this year could seem counterintuitive. Read Here […]
For the first time since 2010, the world economy is outperforming most predictions, and we expect this strength to continue. Our global GDP forecast for 2018 is 4.0%, up from 3.7% in 2017 and meaningfully above consensus. The strength in global growth is broad-based across most advanced and emerging economies, says a Goldman Sachs report […]
A 38-nation Pew Research Center survey finds there are reasons for calm as well as concern when it comes to democracy’s future. More than half in each of the nations polled consider representative democracy a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. Yet, in all countries, pro-democracy attitudes coexist, to varying degrees, with […]
The U.S. just elected the oldest new president in history, and Congress, too, has been getting consistently older, with its average age now up around 60. But the vast majority of the government consists of the 2 million-strong federal civilian workforce. And thanks to slow-moving hiring practices and a huge cohort of baby boomers who […]
Take more than 500 types of industrial product and China ranks first for 220 of them, globally. Yet Beijing isn’t satisfied with just being the world’s factory for cheap goods. More than a third of the country’s 800-million workforce produce biblical amounts of stuff, generating $3 trillion annually, but China’s position is slipping. It’s political and […]
looking beyond borders 