Mobilizing Development Banks to Fight COVID-19

NEW YORK/PARIS – There is no historical precedent for the current worldwide shutdown of most “non-essential” economic activities in response to...

The East-West Divide in COVID-19 Control

NEW YORK – East Asian countries are outperforming the United States and Europe in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that the...

The Real Economic Fallout of COVID-19

BERLIN – Governments around the world are pursuing extremely expansive monetary and fiscal policies to combat the economic fallout from the...

Lessons from Crises Past

STANFORD – The unprecedented shutdown of much of the US economy that has been ordered by federal, state, and local governments is understandable...

Cryptocurrencies’ Time to Shine?

SAN FRANCISCO – Even as all of humanity mobilizes against COVID-19, thoughts are turning to how the world will be different after the crisis. As...

A Letter to G20 Governments

LONDON – We are writing to call for immediate internationally coordinated action – within the next few days – to address our deepening global...

Will COVID-19 Derail the African Century?

NEW YORK – In The Fortunes of Africa, author Martin Meredith describes a Dutch sailing ship that dropped off a load of laundry for the Khoikhoi,...

PS Say More: Kemal Derviş

Can Latin America Afford to Fight COVID-19?

WASHINGTON, DC – Confronting a pandemic is a grueling trial even for the most advanced economies. For indebted governments in Latin America and...

The Private Sector Steps Up

NEW YORK – If the 2008 global financial crisis laid bare the worst of capitalism, the private sector’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is...

Mapping the COVID-19 Recession

CAMBRIDGE – With each passing day, the 2008 global financial crisis increasingly looks like a mere dry run for today’s economic catastrophe. The...

COVID-19 Will Not Reduce Global Reliance on China

SHANGHAI – The global recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is almost certain to be far deeper and more protracted than the one that...

Now or Never for Global Leadership on COVID-19

LONDON – This week, leaders from medicine, economics, politics, and civil society are uniting to demand immediate and coordinated international...

Where Women Stand

BERKELEY – Despite a deep recession in 2008 and a slow recovery thereafter, the first two decades of the twenty-first century were generally a time...

India Besieged

NEW DELHI – “India is walking home,” declared the headline in The Indian Express as newspapers and television screens filled with images of...

At War With a Virus

NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump has labeled himself a wartime president, and many others around the world are using similar language. It’s...

Navigating the Pandemic Trilemma

PRINCETON – The coronavirus crisis is forcing a dramatic reassessment of how government and the economy function. As Matthew M. Kavanagh of...

America’s Gun Virus

NEW YORK – Spooked by COVID-19, Americans not only stripped supermarket shelves of toilet paper and pasta, but also drove gun sales higher than...

The Case for Mandatory Face Masks

NEW YORK – In some ways, the fight against COVID-19 has brought out the best in American society. More than 70,000 doctors, nurses, and others...

Will COVID-19 Remake the World?

CAMBRIDGE – Crises come in two variants: those for which we could not have prepared, because no one had anticipated them, and those for which we...

When Will the Pandemic Cure Be Worse Than the Disease?

MELBOURNE/OXFORD – As of today, almost half the world’s population, nearly four billion people, are under government-mandated lockdowns in an...

Internationalizing the Crisis

NEW YORK – As it spread from one country to another, the novel coronavirus paid no attention to national frontiers or “big, beautiful” border...

The Boredom Pandemic

LONDON – As people around the world find themselves in confinement to control the COVID-19 pandemic, look out for another affliction with an even...

Can Liberal Democracy Survive COVID-19?

MADRID – By some mix of cruel irony and remarkable prescience, the theme of last year’s Venice Biennale – the biennial art exhibition’s...

Is This China’s Global Leadership Moment?

BEIJING – When he welcomed US President Donald Trump to Beijing’s Forbidden City in 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed to the character...

Will Europe Lead or Lag?

What Trump Needs To Say

JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING/NAPLES, FLORIDA – Recently, a reporter at the daily White House coronavirus briefing asked US President Donald Trump what...

Witnessing Wuhan

AUSTIN – Dr. Li, a heart specialist at Wuhan No. 4 Hospital, spent the third week of March preparing for the reopening of the hospital’s...

How COVID-19 Is Transforming Manufacturing

MUNICH – As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates, the risks inherent in global supply chains are more apparent than ever. Rather than await a return...