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For years, India suffered from what came to be called the “Hindu rate of growth” — a result of Jawaharlal Nehru’s policy choices. India’s first prime minister had a fascination for the Soviet Union and championed socialism. In India, this socialist economic model was incongruously...
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, India faces a serious decline in employment due to the COVID-19 crisis. An estimated 122 million people lost their jobs during the first quarter of 2020. Streams of migrant workers returned to their villages — often the only fallback option...
A new report from the International Monetary Fund says that COVID-19 will increase income inequality in emerging markets and developing countries, “further widening the gap between rich and poor” and increasing the urgency for “investment in retraining and reskilling programs can...
In Cambodia, more than 2 million of the country’s 10-million-strong adult workforce hold a microcredit loan. Each of those loans comes to an average of $3,320, or twice the per capita GDP of the country. While microcredit was once considered a useful tool, without a national social assistance...
For nearly two centuries, The Economist has been sitting in the saddle upon its high horse in London with an unfettered view across what was once the British Empire. This has enabled it to offer a clear-sighted, objective analysis of the world’s problems through the lens of its unassailable...
History undergoes serious change thanks in particular to slow events that fly below the media’s radar. Focusing on dramatic, immediate events, the media tends to neglect the major shifts that unfold over time. Paradoxically, slowly developing events that often go unreported tell the true story...
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a man on a mission. The goal: to make Turkey great again. Making Turkey great again, I guess, means wiping history clean of a series of humiliations, from the ignominious decline of the Ottoman Empire, dismissed as the “sick man upon the Bosporus” in the late 1800s, to...
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published his controversial best-seller, “The End of History and the Last Man,” arguing that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. Almost three decades later, G. John Ikenberry, one of the most influential theorists of liberal...
Indian culture venerates tools of trade. Indeed, a special day in the festival calendar is dedicated to worshiping them. In this context, tractors and farm implements are considered almost sacred. Burning a tractor is one of the most symbolic forms of protest. Members of the main opposition party...
Anyone who knows how Wall Street works will not be surprised to learn that when the novel coronavirus epidemic began to turn into a full-fledged pandemic in the first two months of 2020, people in the know saw a major opportunity to play Monopoly. Any major shift affecting society and people’s...
The small Southeast Asian nation of Laos stands out as a success story in COVID-19 control. With only 23 confirmed cases, it has gradually lifted lockdown measures. Success on the medical front, however, will not be enough to carry the country through the economic whiplash that pandemic...
