I Love Coffee dot Today/ShutterstockPoliticians and economists have been pretty vocal in their response to the ongoing saga of Donald Trump’s tariffs. But much less has been heard from the world’s poorest workers about how they will be affected.
The 2024 arrest and subsequent release of activist Paul Watson, the founder of the NGO Sea Shepherd that fights to protect ocean
In the sweltering summer of AD18, a desperate chant echoed across China’s sun-scorched plains: “Heaven has gone blind!” Thousands of starving farmers, their faces smeared with ox blood, marched toward the opulent vaults held by the Han dynasty’s elite rulers.
Not just a British icon – a WHSmith outlet in an airport in Doha, Qatar. TY Lim/ShutterstockAfter 124 years as a familiar fixture to generations of customers, there will no longer be a place for WH Smith on UK high streets.
Recent months have seen a dramatic shift in US policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These changes carry deep economic consequences. President Donald Trump’s executive orders aim to ban DEI initiatives in federal agencies and contractors, and private companies have felt pressure to weaken or drop their DEI programmes. Trump has framed what was once a corporate safeguard against discrimination as “illegal and immoral”, marking a stark reversal in legal and business norms.
The 2025 spring meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund takes place in Washington, D.C. Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesIn 2021, the World Bank shut down one of its flagship projects: the Doing Business index, a global ranking system that measured how easy it was to start and run a business in 190 countries.
Those of us who study trade and investment for a living are, I suspect, becoming exasperated with both the White House stance on tariffs and the way that this is reported in much of the media. US president Donald Trump believes that if a country has a trade surplus with the US it is somehow playing unfairly and needs to be dealt with. But anyone who understands the basics of international economics will recognise the fallacy in both of these beliefs.
Carolyn Franks/ShutterstockGrowth forecasts for the US and other advanced economies have been sharply downgraded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the wake of dramatic swings in US president Donald Trump’s economic policy. But could the uncertainty and the turmoil in financial markets eventually be enough to push the world into a recession?
A few days ago, in a move that attracted international attention, the White House threatened to strip Harvard University of US$2 billion (£1.5 billion) in federal funding, potentially revoke its tax-exempt status and even prevent it from enrolling international students if it didn’t capitulate to a new list of demands.
Every year, American universities spend millions of dollars patenting inventions developed on their campuses. Big names such as Stanford and the University of California system lead the pack in patent activity, but hundreds of other universities are also trying to strike gold by monetizing intellectual property.
