Economics & Business Archive

Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 based on his celebrity status and his reputation as a maverick businessman, vowing to run the country as he ran his real estate empire. The renegotiation of the trade deal with Mexico and Canada formerly known as NAFTA, announced this weekend, is the latest example of how in one striking way, he has been true to his word. The problem is that Trump was a more successful self-promoter than businessman, and the results are on display in the trade deal as well as other aspects of his foreign policy. Early in his […]

Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it. Much of China is on a weeklong holiday to mark the 69th anniversary of the country’s founding. But while the so-called Golden Week, which kicked off with China’s National Day on Monday, could offer a welcome respite from an especially tumultuous period for U.S.-China relations, there were few signs that tensions might ease in sensitive areas like security and trade. Last Wednesday, U.S. B-52 bombers flew over the South China Sea in what Pentagon […]

Deadlines can be useful in negotiations since they often force sides to act. If there is a difference in the intensity of interest in reaching an agreement, however, leverage shifts to the party less desperate to get a deal. That is evident in the now-successful effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada clearly wanted to remain part of the deal. But up to the end, Canadian negotiators behaved as though the deadline was not as hard as their American counterparts insisted. President Donald Trump seemed to badly want an agreement that he could tout as a win […]

Last month, Turkey and Russia, largely on opposites sides of the Syrian civil war, struck an 11th-hour deal to prevent a military assault by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the last remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib in northwestern Syria. While the agreement, which was reached in the Russian Black Sea resort town of Sochi, won’t end the Syrian conflict, it buys some time to attempt to find a sustainable resolution in Idlib, where there are some 30,000 rebel fighters, perhaps a third of them al-Qaida-linked extremists. But if all things fail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has crafted the agreement in […]

Was Donald Trump nasty or nice at the United Nations last week? The answer may depend on whether you listened to his comments from Beijing or Tehran. Diplomatic observers expected the American president to look tough at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Many predicted that he would strike an especially aggressive tone toward Iran. He didn’t disappoint them, using his U.N. appearance to celebrate his withdrawal from the “horrible” Iranian nuclear deal and attack Tehran’s “agenda of aggression and expansion” in the Middle East. Yet there was something formulaic about his rhetoric, and he made no startlingly […]

Months after deadly riots in Port-au-Prince forced the resignation of Haitian Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant, a new government is finally in place. But newly sworn-in Prime Minister Henry Ceant faces a slew of roadblocks, including a major corruption scandal and a yawning budget deficit. Ceant also lacks previous administrative experience and is viewed with suspicion by much of the Haitian political elite. In an email interview with WPR, Francois Pierre-Louis, a former Haitian government official who is now a professor of political science at Queens College, the City University of New York, explains why the new government in Port-au-Prince […]