The IMF marks up the global recovery
ON APRIL 6TH the IMF raised its forecasts for the global economic recovery. The cause? Vaccination programmes and a healthy dose of fiscal stimulus in rich countries. So robust is America’s recovery expected to be that by 2024 it will have overtaken the level of output that had been forecast before the pandemic. The rich…
In poor countries, statistics are both undersupplied and underused
Apr 8th 2021IN THE RICH world, people worry that prying governments know too much about them. Popular culture valorises characters who go off the grid, like Jack Reacher (the hero of 25 novels by Lee Child and two films starring Tom Cruise). He drifts around America on Greyhound buses, eschewing a driving licence, credit cards…
Pakistan’s generals are ever more involved in running the country
BEFORE HE BECAME prime minister, Imran Khan was happy to hold forth about the role of the armed forces in Pakistan. They were so influential in politics, he told The Economist, only because civilian governments had been so ineffectual. Once in office, he said, he would change all that. Yet in early March, when his…
Thailand’s democracy protests are dwindling
Apr 8th 2021LAST SUMMER, despite the tropical heat and humidity, more than 10,000 mostly young protesters paraded repeatedly through central Bangkok. The protests had a carnival atmosphere. Students dressed as Harry Potter, the better to vanquish He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (King Maha Vajiralongkorn); held aloft giant yellow ducks (a symbol popular with democracy activists around the world); and…
Getting into Iraq may soon be much easier
GETTING INTO Iraq has never been easy. Saddam Hussein was loth to grant visas to curious Westerners, lest they see evidence of his regime’s brutality. After his overthrow in 2003, the borders opened up, but war kept civilians away. Then Iraq’s new rulers lowered a paper portcullis, demanding fees and the completion of myriad forms.…
Covid-19 creates a window for school reform in Africa
Apr 8th 2021EVEN BEFORE covid-19 forced its classrooms to close for three months last year, Mavis Maphoto’s school in Botswana had decided that its pupils needed to catch up. At the start of 2020 it began setting aside an hour each day in which to shuffle some of its children out of their usual classes…
Prince unreleased album, Welcome 2 America, to be released in July
A suppressed album recorded in 2010 by the late Prince, Welcome 2 America, will finally reach the masses in July.The Purple Rain star’s estate has teamed with the Sony label Legacy Recordings to drop the archived L.P., one insertion in an immense file away of unreleased recordings. The feature track has been released, a spacey,…
Coinbase’s listing may break records
Apr 10th 2021SAN FRANCISCOTHE NEXT big listing on Wall Street will be a disappointment—at least for cryptocurrency purists. When Coinbase, a marketplace for such digital monies, starts trading on April 14th, it will be on a boring, conventional stock exchange, and not—as might befit one of the world’s biggest crypto firms—on a buzzy blockchain, as…
Totting up bitcoin’s environmental costs
Apr 10th 2021AS COINBASE’S IPO shows, cryptocurrencies have many fans. But they have detractors, too. Environmentalists, in particular, fret about how much energy bitcoin uses. In a paper in Nature Communications, a group of academics led by Dabo Guan of Tsinghua University and Shouyang Wang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences examine bitcoin’s energy use…
Asia’s air bridges and travel bubbles will expand only slowly
Apr 10th 2021MORE THAN a year after they shut their borders, Australia and New Zealand will soon have a go at quarantine-free travel. From April 19th residents of the two countries can fly across the Tasman Sea to do business, see family and friends—or just revel in the novelty of holidaying in another country.Listen to…