Now that world leaders and the D.C. foreign policy establishment have breathed a collective sigh of relief over Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president, things can get back to normal when it comes to preparing for a new administration in Washington. For world leaders, that means scrambling for access and favor, while readying offer sheets of how their governments can be of help to Biden’s team. For the D.C. establishment, that means angling to be part of that team, or else writing lengthy policy proposals that, unlike in 2016, might actually be read by the people who do end up [...]
Cuba’s economy was already struggling before the coronavirus pandemic, due to persistently poor domestic productivity, declining oil shipments from Venezuela and the ratcheting up of U.S. sanctions. But now, the closure of the tourist sector due to COVID-19 has thrown Cuba into a full-fledged recession, deeper than anything since the economic crisis of the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—what Cubans know as the “Special Period.” Perhaps paradoxically, the downturn also appears to have broken a logjam of disagreement among Cuba’s senior leaders and accelerated the implementation of economic reforms. Reforms entail risks, President Miguel Diaz-Canel told [...]
Editor’s Note: This will be Kimberly Ann Elliott’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Kim for all of her insights into economic policy over the past two and a half years, in which she has made sense of tumultuous trade news and offered readers a sharp, lively guide to Donald Trump’s trade wars. The World Trade Organization had plenty of problems before the United States elected an isolationist president determined to put “America first” and go it alone in 2016. Four years ago, the WTO could point to only a few [...]
