The Economist 
Australia’s economy benefits the most from machine learning under scenarios which assume upskilling in the labour force and greater investment … Read more
ONE of the accusations often made against the regime of Hugo Chávez is that the oil boom of the 2000s was squandered. Chavistas bristle at this idea, arguing that Venezuela achieved striking gains in inequality and poverty over the past decade and…
WHEN unveiling Britain’s annual budget on March 19th George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, crowed that the British economy was forecast to grow at an annualised rate of 2.7% in the first quarter of 2014, the fastest in the rich world. His…
SHAREHOLDER activists such as Carl Icahn (pictured) used to be seen as capitalist villains, known as “corporate raiders” and “greenmailers”. Now even the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main markets watchdog, says they have…
IT IS said that nothing in this world is certain except for death and taxes. For those with clever accountants, however, the latter can be kept to a minimum. Individuals have various ways to avoid tax legally by using structured tax shelters or changing…
THE drumbeat of investigations, lawsuits and settlements in the widening scandal over the fixing of benchmark interest rates such as LIBOR has been so steady as to be almost soporific, reducing their ability to shock. The penalty of €1.7 billion ($…
WHEREVER automotive engineers gather, some wag will sooner or later announce that hydrogen is the fuel of the future—and always will be. The hydrogen-powered car has been just around the corner for decades. However, judging from announcements by Honda…
“EL PETROLEO es nuestro!” (“The oil is ours!”). This cry, which rang out in the streets when President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalised the oil industry in 1938, still resonates in Mexico. Bizarrely, it is used as a slogan both by the government, which…
IN 2005 Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, two venture capitalists, were approached with an offer by Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, once the internet’s biggest music-sharing service. In exchange for a small amount, they would be given a…
ONE company you might expect to make three-dimensional (3D) printers is HP, a giant in the world of two-dimensional printing. There are similarities between inkjet printers and desktop 3D printers, which deposit successive layers of molten plastic instead…
THE most revealing graph in a recent New Yorker post on inequality in America is this one: The figure and its data come from Janet Gornick, the director of a CUNY research centre on international inequality. The dark-blue lines tell a now-familiar tale…
THE two gold biscuits an Indian man in Bangkok’s Chinatown holds in his right hand are no bigger than a Swiss army knife. He has just bought them on Yaowarat Road for $15,000, but in his native Mumbai they are worth $16,500. They can travel in a computer…
INDIANS adore gold. Newly wed brides are given enough jewellery to break their necks. Peasants store their pitiful savings in trinkets. Wise-guys sport rings like knuckle-dusters and tycoons with broken balance-sheets offer gold at temples in return…
MOST people think that multinational companies are pretty good at avoiding corporation tax. If that were the case, their tax payments would probably be very low and pretty uniform, irrespective of the country in which the firm was located. They could…
WHAT if America were to scrap all its anti-poverty programmes—welfare, food stamps, unemployment benefits, the works—and replace them with an unconditional basic income (UBI) for everybody? Even in a Congress beset by less extraordinary levels of…