Articles in English

WASHINGTON, DC – The US federal debt-to-GDP ratio rose sharply during the 2008-09 Great Recession and continued rising thereafter, going from 62% in 2007 to 90% in 2010. By 2019, it had reached 106%, and the Congressional Budget Office was warning that the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare would be exhausted by 2028. Many economists argued that a debt-to-GDP ratio of 100% was already worryingly high, and that the future tax increases needed to reduce it would be massive

LONDON – Central banking in emerging markets has undergone a quiet revolution during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike in past crises, they have been able to mimic what central banks in advanced economies have been implementing: counter-cyclical policies with quantitative easing (QE), local-currency asset purchases, interest-rate cuts, and monetization of government deficits

NEW YORK – New research published this July in The Lancet forecasts that continued growth “through the century is no longer the most likely trajectory for the world’s population.” Rather, the global population is likely to peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, before declining to 8.8 billion by 2100. The authors project that the populations of 23 countries – notably Japan, Thailand, Spain, and Ukraine – will be at most half their 2017 size by 2100, while the population of “another 34 countries will probably decline by 25-50%, including China, with a forecasted 48.0% decline.”

NEW YORK – Shortly after US President Donald Trump issued an executive order effectively banning the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok, he issued a second order prohibiting “any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person … as identified by the Secretary of Commerce.” According to the White House, the WeChat ban – which will take effect on September 20 – is intended to protect Americans and visiting Chinese in the United States from violations of privacy by the Chinese government and to limit fake news from the Chinese government reaching Americans. But the ban is likely to be counterproductive, and there are better solutions to these problems

Belarus, a European country of nearly 10 million people, said to be the ‘last dictatorship’ on the continent, now faces a point of no return

With the benchmark Kospi virtually flat from a year ago, the collective wealth of the 50 richest, at $110.8 billion, was nearly unchanged from last year’s $110 billion

Facebook is a key battlefield for the 2020 election but the launch of the Voter Information Centre could see the world's largest social network getting caught in the crossfire

NEW YORK – Following US President Donald Trump’s vow to block US access to TikTok, the popular short-video app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has been in frantic talks with Microsoft, presumably to sell its subsidiary quickly before the ban goes into effect