The United States prepares for moving out of the Trump era with the incoming President promising more rounds of stimulus spending to revive an economy ravaged by Covid-19. Other members of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, a predominantly…
On December 12, in an outburst of suppressed anger, workers employed at a factory assembling iPhones in Narasapura near Bengaluru ransacked its premises and damaged parked vehicles. The facility is a unit of Wistron, a Taiwanese vendor engaged in assembly…
It was a long time coming, but the day of reckoning for the big digital companies may finally have arrived. Despite the growing monopoly power of big tech and their use of anti-competitive practices, earlier attempts to regulate them (such…
A month after the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement among 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific, speculation on what could be its economic and strategic fallout has waned. Attention seems to have been diverted by the more…
Because a pandemic can be overcome only when it is overcome everywhere, embracing an every-country-for-itself approach would seem irrational. And yet, as the unseemly competition for vaccine doses indicates, that is exactly what many countries have done. The American pharmaceutical…
The fall in remittance flows following the loss of migrant jobs in leading host countries has been among the many adverse effects of the Covid crisis on developing countries. While there have been job losses across the board in regions…
In a move that was expected, the US Justice Department has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against internet search giant Google, alleging that it resorts to anti-competitive practices to ensure its dominance in the search engine space and, through that, over…
The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world. The experience of the pandemic is probably the most extreme and definitive expression of that: the ability of China to contain…
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has for some months been bringing out a report that monitors the impact of the pandemic on the world economy, especially the labour-hours lost because of the lockdown and their ramifications. The statistics it provides…
Wealth distribution data are notoriously difficult to interpret. This is because variations in stock prices affect wealth distribution, so that a stock market boom suddenly makes the rich appear much richer, while a stock market collapse makes wealth distribution less…
