CAMBRIDGE: I was recently invited by two Harvard colleagues to make a guest appearance in their course on globalization. “I have to tell you,” one of them warned me beforehand, “this is a pretty pro-globalization crowd.” In the very first meeting, (...)
CAMBRIDGE: One of our era's foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging (...)
CAMBRIDGE: The world economy is entering a new phase, in which achieving global cooperation will become increasingly difficult. The United States and the European Union, now burdened by high debt and low growth — and therefore preoccupied with (...)
CAMBRIDGE: When questioned recently about a constitutional law professor who was arrested for lecturing at an institute run by the country's main pro-Kurdish political party, Turkey's interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, couldn't hide his (...)
CAMBRIDGE: As if the economic ramifications of a full-blown Greek default were not terrifying enough, the political consequences could be far worse. A chaotic eurozone breakup would cause irreparable damage to the European integration project, the (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman's birth. Friedman was one of the twentieth century's leading economists, a Nobel Prize winner who made notable contributions to monetary policy and consumption theory. But he (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Greedy banks, bad economic ideas, incompetent politicians: there is no shortage of culprits for the economic crisis in which rich countries are engulfed. But there is also something more fundamental at play, a flaw that lies deeper than (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Perhaps for the first time in modern history, the future of the global economy lies in the hands of poor countries. The United States and Europe struggle on as wounded giants, casualties of their financial excesses and political (...)
ISTANBUL: In a Hollywood courtroom drama, you know that the hero, set up by the bad guys, will eventually be cleared — but not before the noose tightens around his neck. Just when it looks like the accumulating evidence has condemned him, a sudden (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Greece has bought some time with a new package of financial support, but the country is not out of the woods yet. It remains to be seen whether the souped-up austerity policies that Prime Minister George Papandreou's government has (...)
CAMBRIDGE: I have been presenting my new book “The Globalization Paradox” to different groups of late. By now I am used to all types of comments from the audience. But at a recent book-launch event, the economist assigned to discuss the book (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Not long ago, a Harvard colleague wrote to me that Saif Al-Islam El-Qaddafi, a son of Libya's dictator, would be in town and wanted to meet me. He is an interesting fellow, my colleague said, with a doctorate from the London School of (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Perhaps the most striking finding in the United Nations' recent 20th anniversary Human Development Report is the outstanding performance of the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Here was Tunisia, ranked sixth among 135 (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Suppose that the world's leading policymakers were to meet again in Bretton Woods, New Hamp¬shire, to design a new global economic order. They would natu¬rally be preoccupied with today's problems: the eurozone crisis, global recovery, (...)
CAMBRIDGE: When Greece was bailed out by a joint eurozone-IMF rescue package back in May, it was clear that the deal had bought only a temporary respite. Now the other shoe has dropped. With Ireland's troubles threatening to spill over to Portugal, (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Everybody agrees that the world economy is ill, but the diagnosis apparently depends on which corner of it you happen to inhabit.
In Washington, accusing fingers point to China, blaming its currency policy for causing large trade (...)
CAMBRIDGE: In the early days of the global financial crisis, there was some optimism that developing countries would avoid the downturn that advanced industrial countries experienced. After all, this time it was not they that had engaged in (...)
ISTANBUL: “Turkish democracy is at a turning point,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced after winning a crucial vote in a referendum to change Turkey's constitution. “We are sitting an important exam.”
Erdoğan is right, but it is he (...)
CAMBRIDGE: China's trade balance is on course for another bumper surplus this year. Meanwhile, concern about the health of the US recovery continues to mount. Both developments suggest that China will be under renewed pressure to nudge its currency (...)
CAMBRIDGE: On a recent Saturday morning, several hundred pro-democracy activists congregated in a Moscow square to protest government restrictions on freedom of assembly. They held up signs reading “31,” in reference to Article 31 of the Russian (...)
CAMBRIDGE: A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of “market confidence.”
It may have been fear of communism that agitated governments when Karl Marx penned the opening line of his famous manifesto in 1848, but today it is the dread that (...)
CAMBRIDGE: Financial meltdown has been averted in Europe — for now. But the future of the European Union and the fate of the eurozone still hang in the balance. If Europe doesn't find a way to reactivate the continent's economy soon, it will be (...)
CAMBRIDGE: The $140 billion support package that the Greek government has finally received from its European Union partners and the International Monetary Fund gives it the breathing space needed to undertake the difficult job of putting its (...)
CAMBRIDGE: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown promotes it as a vehicle for creating high-skill jobs. French President Nicolas Sarkozy talks about using it to keep industrial jobs in France. The World Bank's chief economist, Justin Lin, openly (...)
CAMBRIDGE: In the world of economics and finance, revolutions occur rarely and are often detected only in hindsight. But what happened on February 19 can safely be called the end of an era in global finance.
On that day, the International (...)