Joseph E Stiglitz

Although America's right-wing plutocrats may disagree about how to rank the country's major problems—for example, inequality, slow growth, low productivity, opioid addiction, poor schools, and deteriorating infrastructure—the solution is always the same: lower taxes and deregulation, to “incentivise” investors and “free up” the economy.

Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.

Donald Trump has thrown a hand grenade into the global economic architecture that was so painstakingly constructed in the years

The likely victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election has elicited a global sigh of relief.

Today, a quarter-century after the Cold War's end, the West and Russia are again at odds. This time, though, at least on one side, the

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies — whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico — are stronger. But Trump's approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

Donald Trump grasped the spirit of the time: things weren't going well, and many voters wanted change. Now they will get it: there will be no business as usual. But seldom has there been more uncertainty. Which policies Trump will pursue remains unknown, to say nothing of which will succeed or what the consequences will be.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. I would hate to say “I told you so,”

The problems posed by the disaffected Americans – resulting from decades of neglect – will not be solved quickly or by conventional tools. An effective strategy will need to consider more unconventional solutions, which Republican corporate interests are unlikely to favour.

Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing to heed this message.

It's been a quarter-century since Japan's asset bubble burst – and a quarter-century of malaise as one “lost decade” has followed another.

In response to asymmetric shocks and divergences in productivity, there would have to be adjustments in the real (inflation-adjusted) exchange rate, meaning that prices in the eurozone periphery would have to fall relative to Germany and northern Europe.

The failure of globalisation to deliver on the promises of mainstream politicians has surely undermined trust and confidence in the “establishment.” And governments' offers of generous bailouts for the banks that had brought on the 2008 financial crisis, while leaving ordinary citizens largely to fend for themselves, reinforced the view that this failure was not merely a matter of economic misjudgments.

For 200 years, there have been two schools of thought about what determines the distribution of income – and how the economy functions.

I wrote at the beginning of January that economic conditions this year were set to be as weak as in 2015, which was the worst year

SOMETHING interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: Young people are voting in ways that are

Sri Lanka is fortunate to have a low level of urbanisation today; but this is likely to change in the next two decades. This gives the country the opportunity to create model cities, based on the adequate provision of public services and sound public transport and attuned to the cost of carbon and climate change.

Last year was a memorable one for the global economy. Not only was overall performance disappointing, but profound changes – both for better and for worse – occurred in the global economic system.

Former US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke once said that the world is suffering from a “savings glut.”

It is perhaps true that unhealthy habits are more concentrated among poor Americans, a disproportionate number of whom are black. But these habits themselves are a consequence of economic conditions, not to mention the stresses of racism.