Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
The official pursuit of happiness
By Derek Bok CAMBRIDGE: In a time of tight budgets and financial crisis, politicians nowadays look to economic growth as the centerpiece of their domestic policy programs. Gross domestic product is taken to be the leading indicator of national well-being. But, as we look ahead to 2011 and beyond, we should ask ourselves: is it really …
Saudi Arabia: Playing it safe
By Oxford Business Group The companies listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange, or Tadawul, have a joint value of some $320 billion. However, unlike most of the bourses operated by its neighbours, Saudi Arabia’s stock market is only now cautiously opening up to direct foreign trading. Currently, foreign investors have limited avenues by which they can …
No to a bloody future for Egypt
By Amira Salah-Ahmed CAIRO: Al-Qeddesine Church (Church of the Two Saints) is just blocks away from my family’s home in Alexandria, Egypt, where I spent endless days and nights among relatives and friends feeling soundly safe. For decades, we’ve lived alongside our Coptic neighbors in this part of the Mediterranean city known for many things: its …
India’s elites in crisis
By Sanjeev Sanyal NEW DELHI: For a country with 1.2 billion people, India is ruled by a surprisingly small elite, which runs everything from the government to large companies and even sports bodies. But a series of scandals, some involving billions of dollars, has now seriously undermined that elite’s standing in the eyes of the Indian …
Independence or war
By Charles Tannock STRASBOURG: In the 1990s, the world averted its eyes to genocide in Rwanda, and to the “Great Lakes War” in eastern Congo, which claimed upward of five million lives — the most in any war since World War II. Will such silence and neglect prevail again if civil war is renewed in Sudan? …
US shift may mean end of bilateral approach
By Ghassan Khatib The recent shift in the American approach for running the peace process left the Palestinians with different and sometimes contradicting reactions. Initially, the Palestinians were very worried after news leaked about possible American-Israeli negotiations over a deal that would involve American incentives to convince Israel to freeze settlement activities for two or three …
Jordan: Healthy growth
By Oxford Business Group Jordan is fast turning medical tourism into a mainstay of the kingdom’s economy, with the sector likely to soon turn a healthy profit thanks to the high levels of public and private investment in hospitals, medical facilities and staff training. Jordan is well established in the medical tourism sector, having welcomed foreign …
Lebanon: Moment of truth
By Oxford Business Group While Lebanon’s economy has performed soundly over the past year, there are lingering concerns that political instability could weaken investor confidence in the capital markets, unwinding economic progress made in the last year. The political climate has become increasingly heated in the past few months due to a standoff between Shia movement …
Terrorism cannot be the outcome of any proper understanding of religion
By Ali Gomaa CAIRO: There is no religion worthy of the name that does not regard as one of its highest values the sanctity of human life. Islam is no exception to this rule. Indeed, God has made this unequivocal in the Quran by emphasizing the gravity of the universal prohibition against murder, saying of the …
New Year’s hope against hope
By Joseph Stiglitz NEW YORK: The time has come for New Year’s resolutions, a moment of reflection. When the last year hasn’t gone so well, it is a time for hope that the next year will be better. For Europe and the United States, 2010 was a year of disappointment. It’s been three years since the …
Sticking to it
By Peter Singer MELBOURNE: Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New Year’s resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know that it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution …
Europe’s contribution to peace in Sudan
By George Clooney and John Prendergast WASHINGTON, DC: Sudan sits at the proverbial crossroads between potential peace and possible nationwide conflict, which would undoubtedly become the world’s deadliest conventional war in 2011. A referendum on South Sudan’s independence, scheduled for Jan. 9, 2011, will likely split the country in two, with southerners finally achieving the freedom …
The Year of the Ghoul
By Amr Fouad I rarely remember my dreams, Hardly recall yesterday, Unknown tomorrow, frothed among sea heaves, On this earth forever I shan’t stay. This scribbling of a poem I wrote six years ago at a creative writing course seemed to me at the time the peak of the pitch dark caves howling inside my …
Egypt’s formula for growth
By Oxford Business Group CAIRO: Legal wrangling over a new pricing plan for Egypt’s pharmaceuticals has not dampened confidence in the sector, with rising domestic demand expected to ensure robust profits over the next decade. The Ministry of Health last year introduced a new drug-pricing regime under which brand-named drugs were priced 10 percent lower than …
Qatar: Banking goals
By Oxford Business Group Although the 2022 football World Cup is more than a decade away, analysts are already predicting increased loan activity and investment management in Qatar’s banking sector as the economy gears up to host football’s showcase event. Following the decision awarding Qatar the tournament on December 2, Moody’s Investor Service issued an advisory …
A united Egypt can defeat any enemy
By Firas Al-Atraqchi I had never imagined when I started to write an article about the cold-blooded violence targeting the Christians of Iraq that I would be mourning for their Coptic brethren in Egypt. On Dec. 30, four Christian homes were attacked in Baghdad; an elderly couple were among the dead. The assaults came weeks after …
Why is rape different?
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: As Swedish prosecutors’ sex-crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange play out in the international media, one convention of the coverage merits serious scrutiny. We know Assange by name. But his accusers — the two Swedish women who have brought the complaints against him — are consistently identified only as “Miss …
Urbanizing China
By Fan Gang BEIJING: Measured by the percentage of people living in its cities, China’s urbanization rate currently stands at about 48 percent, according to official statistics. Given that the share of city dwellers was only 18 percent just 30 years ago, this is remarkable progress. But it is still unsatisfactory, because most other countries at …
Getting corruption right
By Jagdish Bhagwati NEW YORK: I just returned from India, where I was lecturing to the Indian Parliament in the same hall where US President Barack Obama had recently spoken. The country was racked by scandal. A gigantic, ministerial-level scam in the mobile-telephone sector had siphoned off many billions of dollars to a corrupt politician. But …
A time to spend
By J. Bradford DeLong BERKELEY: The central insight of macroeconomics is a fact that was known to John Stuart Mill in the first third of the nineteenth century: there can be a large gap between supply and demand for pretty much all currently produced goods and services and types of labor if there is an equally …
Belonging to the land, not owning it
By Sharon Rosen and Suheir Rasul JERUSALEM: Even back in those tempestuous years of the 1960s and 1970s when the possibility of peace was just a dream in the minds and heart of a few, Arie “Lova” Eliav and Issam Sartawi knew what they were talking about. An Israeli and a Palestinian, both politicians and seated …
How Egypt’s banks can profitably mitigate climate change
By Mohammed Taha Rafi As climate change takes center stage in the global and regional arenas, as well as here in Egypt, financial institutions can play a leadership role in our planet’s next act. Specifically, by offering innovative loan products, they can help businesses and industries seize emerging opportunities to mitigate and adapt to climate change. …
What’s so good about America’s tax package?
By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: The tax package agreed to by President Barack Obama and his Republican opponents in the United States Congress represents the right mix of an appropriate short-run fiscal policy and a first step toward longer-term fiscal prudence. The key feature of the agreement is to continue the existing 2010 income-tax rates for another …
Decoding Egypt: Mubarak’s regime against the Washington Post
By Nael Shama CAIRO: Egyptians feel so bitter today as they see their country, an ancient civilization and a political powerhouse in the Middle East, sink into poverty and underdevelopment at home and nearly recede into irrelevance regionally and internationally. After decades of authoritarian rule, the ambitions of the regime are now limited to maintaining its …
Exiting the Middle East labyrinth
By Joschka Fischer BERLIN: Two years have passed since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Much to his credit — and in contrast to his immediate predecessor — Obama tried, from his first day in office, to work towards a resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Two years on, are good …
What we’ll learn from the next round of Wikileaks
By Yossi Alpher Wikileaks leak of December 2011: Secret cable from DCM, US Embassy Tel Aviv, to deputy under secretary of state for Middle East affairs, State Department, Washington. Dec. 28, 2010: I exploited the Christmas/New Years lull here at the embassy, where just a few of us have not left on vacation, to make …
Haifa’s fire and the world’s double standards
By Diana Buttu With several international aircraft maneuvering the skies, the scene resembled a synchronized air show with airplanes diving and peaking in perfect tune. Bright yellow fire-extinguishing aircraft ascended sharply among the green pine trees spraying bright orange fire retardant and in the distance the yellow and red flames of the Carmel fire danced. Israelis …
America’s political class struggle
By Jeffrey Sachs NEW YORK: America is on a collision course with itself. This month’s deal between President Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress to extend the tax cuts initiated a decade ago by President George W. Bush is being hailed as the start of a new bipartisan consensus. I believe, instead, that it is …
Is eradicating polio a good idea?
By Arthur Caplan PHILADELPHIA: Polio broke out in Central Asia this year, with 560 cases reported in Tajikistan. Cases have also been diagnosed in Russia and Uzbekistan, apparently transmitted by infected but asymptomatic people traveling from Tajikistan. The Tajikistan outbreak is especially troubling, because the country had been certified by the World Health Organization as polio-free. …
In Russia, drug use is fueling aids epidemic
By Dr. César Chelala NEW YORK: Russia has one of the world’s most serious epidemics of injection drug-use, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS. It is estimated that Russia has two million injecting drug users (IDUs), 60-70 percent of whom have HIV-related illnesses. In the past decade, the number of HIV-infected people has …