Abdullah Shibli

I voted in the recently concluded midterm elections early in my home state before I boarded the flight to Los Angeles. It's a family trip, but there was an added incentive for me too.

My last column “Uncer-tainty and volatility in the coming years,” published on October 27, elicited some interesting feedback on social media.

As the year 2018 gradually inches towards the finish line, there are many concerns about the next year. Is economic growth going to be as good as the last?

Human consump-tion of fossil fuel is a significant contributor to climate change. Economists have for ages been advocating for a tax on carbon emissions to combat air pollution. The tax, popularly known as “carbon tax”, is levied on products that emit carbon and is one of the measures adopted by many countries to reduce the consumption of fossil fuel in an effort to address the threat of climate change.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in his 2018 SDG progress report, while reporting major achievements in some areas, also emphasised in no uncertain terms the need for reliable data.

Modern democracy is based on a few principles well-known to all but always worth reiterating in order to foster growth and participation of the electorate.

Climate change will hit Bangladesh, and rising temperature and sea level will affect millions in both the short- and long-term. However, it has also embarked on a path to accelerate growth and achieve middle-income status in the immediate future.

It is now agreed by all that financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development programme to reach the SDG targets will be a tough challenge. On September 24, the Secretary-General of the United Nations,

How long will women working the same job continue to earn less, sometimes 50 percent less, than men? And when do we expect this gap to go away?

As the US celebrated Labour Day on September 3, millions of the working majority were wondering what happened to the powerful labour unions or the promise of rising wages in a growing economy.

Prime Minister Theresa May recently was on a three-nation tour of Africa. Her first stop was South Africa, the first by a British prime minister since 2011. She then went on to Nigeria and Kenya, becoming the first British PM to visit the East African country in over 30 years.

Air pollution in big cities of Bangladesh, particularly Dhaka and Chittagong, is an ongoing concern for all. Only recently, WHO ranked Dhaka's air quality as the third worst, behind New Delhi and Cairo, in a study of megacities with a population of 14 million or more.

The latest gossip in Washington, DC, the US capital these days is “Will they or won't they?” I am referring to the possible Trump-Putin

The Rohingyas who moved to Bangladesh reached an important milestone on August 25, 2018. The first anniversary of the exodus from their homeland in Myanmar was observed with solemnity in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and everywhere that the Rohingya diaspora have now spread out to.

Suppose you decide to conduct an experiment, and ask a random person you come across on a busy thoroughfare in Dhaka: “Can you tell me what Bangladesh and Turkey have in common?”

Pakistan's founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, reportedly was disappointed with the British partition of India in 1947 because it divided Punjab and Bengal. Jinnah complained that he was given to rule a “truncated and moth-eaten Pakistan.”

There is a popular saying in America, “You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand politics.” However, I have never heard anyone disparage economists in such a fashion except only recently during the Trump Era.

Almost one year after the recent Rohingya crisis began, Myanmar appears to be finally responding to international appeals for action.

Two recent reports depicting the state of human rights in Bangladesh point to some alarming statistics. The first report, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' “Report on Bangladesh Sample Vital Statistics 2017”(RBSVS), came out in June 2018. Among its many findings, one relates to the prevalence of underage marriage for women.

President Donald Trump of the USA and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki, the capital of Finland on July 16.