Monsoon rains battered down on Manila this week as a tropical storm -- the ninth this year -- howled nearby. Schools, courts and the senate were shut for two days; roads were flooded; public transport was affected. 　It could have been worse.　That the Philippine capital is one big ocean wave away from disaster isn’t news to climate scientists or economists. After analyzing 393 cyclone-vulnerable coastal cities in 31 countries, World Bank economists have concluded that 40 percent of the burden of

In the US and other developed countries, there are three basic philosophies of macroeconomic stabilization. Each of them was present in some form during the Great Depression, and each survives to this day.　The first is Keynesianism, which centers on fiscal stimulus, mainly in the form of increased government spending. The second is monetarism, which holds that getting economies out of recession is the job of the central bank, which can lower interest rates, engage in quantitative easing or ease

No country’s culture is static. Many, even some scholars in the field, often make the mistake of referring to culture as if it were some monolithic constant that persists from one generation to the next. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take, for example, the culture of young Korean adults.Joseon-era Korean culture was characterized by Confucian ideals: most notably, the emphasis on family. Filial piety and the willingness to sacrifice for one’s family were considered great virtues. Even

Ann McFeatters

There’s no chance China will cut its trade surplus with the US in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats. For starters, Washington has made no specific demand to which Beijing can respond. But its efforts may have an unexpected side effect: a debt crisis in China.　The 25 percent additional tariffs on exports of machinery and electronics looked, at first blush, like a stealth tax on offshoring. The focus on categories like semiconductors and nuclear components, in which US-owned manu

How’s this for a thought experiment the day after President Donald Trump provoked bipartisan disgust over his performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin: Try to think charitably and ascribe rational, noncorrupt motives to political actors.　Looking at domestic politics, Trump may simply think that any acknowledgment on his part of Russian efforts to elect him discredits his presidency. Looking internationally, it would be possible to explain Trump’s behavior as an expression of a radically

It’s the go-to measure of an economy. But sometimes gross domestic product doesn’t tell you much.　A glance at China’s second-quarter GDP, released Monday, might suggest things are holding up pretty well in the world’s second-largest economy. The 6.7 percent increase from a year ago -- just barely below the prior period -- points to a China that weathered the early skirmishes of a trade war, continued its transition to a consumption-driven economy and isn’t suffering too much from a state campaig

US President Donald Trump was doing pretty well in Helsinki, really, laying out a modest but achievable agenda for improving US-Russia relations. And then came the final question about whether Trump believed his own intelligence chiefs or Russian President Vladimir Putin -- and in his weird, waffling answer, you could almost hear the fabric of his presidency rip at the seam. Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press was the reporter who asked Trump bluntly: “who do you believe” about Russian elect

Fifty years ago this month, in the midst of the Cold War, nations began signing an international treaty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Today, as artificial intelligence and machine learning reshape every aspect of our lives, the world confronts a challenge of similar magnitude and it needs a similar response.　There is a danger in pushing the parallel between nuclear weapons and AI too far. But the greater risk lies in ignoring the consequences of unleashing technologies whose goals are n