Business lobbyists complain that a regulatory tsunami is on its way. But some firms are embracing the proposed reforms “WHEN people hear the word regulation, they feel stifled, delayed, and many times they believe that government is being intrusive,” said Hilda Solis, America’s labour secretary, on December 7th as she unveiled plans for 90 new regulatory initiatives to improve the lot of workers. If you doubt her word, try mentioning regulation...

Spewing summit The Copenhagen summit will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians. Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the December 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of CO2, most of it from their flights to Copenhagen. This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools. The calculation includes...

We Indians implicitly believe in India’s great past. Recently, that past has been given a statistical underpinning by Angus Maddison. To celebrate the beginning of the 21st century, Maddison wrote a book called The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. There he says that India was the world’s largest economy in the first millennium AD. It produced one-third of the world’s income in the first century, and 29 per cent in...

The near total political paralysis of one of India's largest states, Andhra Pradesh, over its proposed carve-up, raises fresh questions about how the world's largest democracy will handle questions of identity and territory in this young century. Telangana, the new state proposed, is not a fresh demand, but even as it seems closer than ever to materialising, it opens a Pandora's box in a vast country of over a billion...

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline...