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  • News & article

    Long hours won't help India grow

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 06/11/2023

    » Do Indians not work enough? According to one of the co-founders of the Indian software giant Infosys Ltd, we don't. The billionaire Narayana Murthy said last week that young Indians in particular were picking up "undesirable habits" from the lazy West and thereby holding back India's productivity and its growth. "My request," he said, "is that our youngsters must say, 'This is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week.'"

  • News & article

    West's message on war gets lost

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 09/03/2023

    » Here in New Delhi, policymakers are beginning to worry. India's long-awaited presidency of the G-20 grouping is turning out to be even more difficult than they anticipated.

  • News & article

    Investment will not bring peace to Kashmir

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 08/08/2019

    » India's parliament has rubber-stamped the government's decision to end Kashmir's 70 years of autonomy and turn it into a "union territory" closely supervised by New Delhi.

  • News & article

    US reign at World Bank must end now

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 08/02/2019

    » In many ways, David Malpass, whom US President Donald Trump nominated to head the World Bank, is an unsurprising choice. He's a senior Treasury official overseeing international affairs. Plus, his background absolutely screams "Trump nominee": He isn't a woman (Indra Nooyi, formerly of PepsiCo Inc, was being considered). He is an outspoken critic of the institution he is now to head (recall Scott Pruitt's tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency). And he has a controversial Wall Street background (he was chief economist at the ill-fated Bear Stearns), as well as some embarrassing calls in his past (he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2007 insisting that the housing market couldn't pull down the broader economy).

  • News & article

    China should remember its old friends

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 19/12/2018

    » Nobody can know if, when Deng Xiaoping launched his strategy of "Reform and Opening Up" 40 years ago, even he could have predicted the near-miraculous transformation of the Chinese economy that would follow. In the years since then, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject poverty and into the ranks of the global middle class; China's industrial heartland became the workshop of the world; and the People's Republic has muscled its way into the first rank of global powers.

  • News & article

    Belt and Road hits a pothole in Pakistan

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 12/10/2018

    » Pakistan's government has finally admitted it needs help. Finance Minister Asad Umar says he will be meeting officials of the International Monetary Fund in Bali this weekend. There he'll try and work out the terms for a bailout that would cover a US$10 billion (328 billion baht) hole in Pakistan's financing needs.

  • News & article

    China's Sri Lankan push for power

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 31/10/2018

    » Most people in the island nation of Sri Lanka and its Asian neighbours were stunned last week when President Maithripala Sirisena dismissed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe -- and replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaksa, the populist strongman who had ruled Sri Lanka for a decade before the scrappy alliance between Mr Sirisena and Mr Wickremesinghe forced him out of power in 2015.

  • News & article

    Hole at heart of China's Silk Road

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 09/08/2018

    » Nobody pretends the People's Republic of China is an entirely benign power, least of all its leaders in Beijing. Yet, even by the standards of what continues to be a remarkably repressive state, the stories that are emerging from behind the Great Firewall about the crackdown on Xinjiang's Uighur Muslim population are deeply disturbing and deserve more of the world's attention.

  • News & article

    China's Silk Road isn't so smooth

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 12/07/2018

    » You may not have noticed, what with the outbreak of trade war with the US and all, but China's economic diplomacy has had a bad few weeks. The country's flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is dealing with ever-greater resistance, slowing a momentum that once seemed unstoppable. In fact, I'd argue that the BRI is stalled.

  • News & article

    Indians' skills don't match up -- yet

    News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 16/11/2017

    » If India is to live up the expectations of its own people and become a successful middle-income country in a few decades, the country has multiple problems to solve -- its sclerotic politics, its clogged infrastructure, its choked judicial system, its lack of investable capital, its interfering and inefficient state. But perhaps the greatest hurdle is its poor stock of human capital. Without better education, health and skills, India won't be able to build a middle class and its efforts to become the next China can't succeed.

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