On a recent holiday in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, I couldn’t resist thinking about these countries’ economic potential and ongoing policy challenges.

A decade after the global financial crisis, policymakers worldwide are still assessing how best to prevent bank failures from tanking the economy again.

With global temperatures rising at an alarming rate, the race is on to lower the world’s consumption of fossil fuels and accelerate the adoption of greener forms of energy.

In February, Forbes published its first-ever list of cryptocurrencies’ richest people. The top ten were each worth around $1 billion, while the wealthiest – an American blockchain innovator named Chris Larsen – was estimated to be worth $8 billion.

Later this century, when economic historians compare the “Great Recession” that started in 2007 with the Great Depression that started in 1929, they will arrive at two basic conclusions.

The trade confrontation between the United States and China is heating up. After firing an opening salvo of steep tariffs on steel and aluminum, the US administration has released a plan for a 25% tariff on 1,333 Chinese imports – worth about $50 billion last year – to punish China for what it views as decades of intellectual property theft.

Caspian flotilla will be relocated from Astrakhan to the town of Kaspiysk, Dagestan, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said earlier this week.

As China and the United States engage in their latest trade tussle, most economists take it as given that China will achieve global economic supremacy in the long run, no matter what happens now.

March 29 marked exactly one year since British Prime Minister Theresa May invoked Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, thus launching the formal two-year legal process by which the United Kingdom will withdraw from the European Union.

Until the terrorist attack at a market in southern France on March 23, French President Emmanuel Macron had been planning to launch a new European-level political campaign. Though the official rollout has now been postponed, Macron’s latest project remains central to his presidency and to his conception of power.

Last year, a 30-year-old teacher suffering from a severe bloodstream infection arrived in my emergency room for treatment.

In an age of rapid technological innovation, it is shameful that almost two million people will die from tuberculosis this year because they are too poor to afford treatment. Indeed, the reason why TB continues to take lives is simple: indifference.

Last month, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for global action to minimize the risk posed by electronic warfare to civilians.

For most people, the choice between a life-threatening disease and a lifetime of crippling debt is no choice at all.

Last year, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump were hurling kindergarten insults at each other – “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission,” said Trump of Kim; “mentally deranged US dotard,” Kim retorted – while threatening to reduce East Asia to a post-atomic wasteland.

Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence (for example, the quantum leap demonstrated by DeepMind’s self-learning chess program last December), seeing little impact on longer-term trend growth.

Predictions that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will fail typically elicit a broader defense of the underlying blockchain technology.

On March 8, the world will celebrate International Women’s Day, an annual opportunity to recommit to gender equality.

One of the most pressing public-health challenges in Africa today is also one of the least reported: cancer, a leading cause of death worldwide.

Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence (for example, the quantum leap demonstrated by DeepMind’s self-learning chess program last December), seeing little impact on longer-term trend growth.

They lie about 150 miles apart in the vast brushlands of northern Nigeria, but the towns of Chibok and Dapchi have a tragic bond: both have been targets of large-scale kidnappings of schoolgirls by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram.

Around the world, gender bias is attracting renewed attention. Through protest marches and viral social-media campaigns, women everywhere are demanding an end to sexual harassment, abuse, femicide, and inequality.

For decades, the Western world put its faith in a well-defined and broadly accepted economic paradigm with applications at both the national and global levels.

Three months ago, I argued that rising stock markets around the world were a consequence of improving economic conditions, not a sign of “irrational exuberance.

After decades of serving as the backbone of a rules-based global order, the United States, under President Donald Trump, is touting an “America First” agenda that extols narrow economic nationalism and distrust of international institutions and agreements.