How World Bank leaders put pressure on staff to alter a global index
THE WORLD BANK’S Doing Business rankings, which are followed closely by leaders in China, India and elsewhere, are supposed to gauge how easy it is to do business in 190 countries. But the rankings have instead become a revealing gauge of how the World Bank itself does business under political pressure. In so doing, they…
Middle Eastern foes are giving diplomacy a shot
Sep 18th 2021DUBAI AND ISTANBULIT WAS A surprising choice for a summer holiday. On August 18th Tahnoon bin Zayed, the national-security adviser of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), turned up in Ankara to meet Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. The countries have been at odds for years over Mr Erdogan’s support for Islamist…
Is China already the world’s most dominant economy?
IN 2010, WHEN President Barack Obama welcomed his Chinese counterpart to a summit in Washington, DC, he greeted him with a handshake and a swift, shallow dip of the head. The image of America’s president bowing before China made an arresting cover photo for the book “Eclipse”, published the following year. The book, written by…
South Asia’s non-binary communities worry about losing their identity
Sep 18th 2021IN MARCH, WHEN Tashnuva Anan Shishir appeared on Bangladeshi television screens, she created history as the country’s first transgender news anchor. A few weeks later a madrassa exclusively for khwaja saras opened in Pakistan. In India “Phirki”, a television show that ran for 225 episodes last year, portrayed in unprecedented detail the lives…
What next for Islamists in the Arab world?
THE STRICT Islamism of the Taliban may be back in Afghanistan, but peaceful Islamists in the Arab world have struggled of late. Ennahda, which styles itself “Muslim democratic”, had been the biggest party in Tunisia’s parliament—until President Kais Saied suspended the assembly in July. Just over a month later, in Morocco, the Justice and Development…
The travails of teaching Arabs their own language
Sep 18th 2021GOD, SAYS the Koran, chose Arabic for his revelation because it is easy to understand. But many of the world’s 470m Arabic-speakers beg to differ. According to a report by the World Bank, almost 60% of ten-year-olds in Arabic-speaking countries (and Iran) struggle to read and understand a basic text. Despite decades of…
How America should spend on child care
Sep 18th 2021UNLIKE MOST rich European countries, America lacks a coherent public child-care regime. But it has come surprisingly close to having one. During the second world war Congress set up federal child-care centres to encourage women to work in factories; these were later dismantled. In 1971 Congress passed a comprehensive child-care plan. But President…
Labour’s share in national income is both over- and under-explained
Sep 18th 2021THE IDEA that the spoils of the modern economy are unfairly distributed has become part of public discourse in the rich world. One common villain is the growing class of wealth-owners living off the returns from capital rather than hard-earned wages, an explanation popularised by Thomas Piketty in his book, “Capital in the…
Australia’s states are asserting themselves
Sep 18th 2021ACROSS MUCH of Asia, the pandemic has given national leaders an excuse to unleash authoritarian instincts—think Thailand, the Philippines or India. Australia, though, provides a stark contrast. There, authority has conspicuously ebbed away from the federal government and to the vast country’s six states.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy…
India’s pupils have been hard hit by extended school closures
AS COVID-19 MEASURES relax across the world, nothing brings quite so much relief as the reopening of schools. For India’s 320m schoolchildren, its 8.5m teachers and for parents, too, the relief is particularly acute. Not only have Indian schools suffered some of the world’s longest closures—an average of 69 weeks. For reasons peculiar to India,…