Category: Economic Reform

Corruption overshadows Ukraine aid package

     

  “You can’t catch a big fish with a small, thin rod” said Volodymyr Groysman, the prime minister of Ukraine, when asked why not a single “big fish” has been… Read more »

Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change

     

“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »

Brexit is a ‘warning to the liberal international order’

     

The British people’s decision to leave the European Union is the country’s single biggest democratic act in modern times, notes commentator Andrew Marr – and one of the elite’s most… Read more »

Russia’s election countdown: opposition pressured by Kremlin

     

Russia’s liberal opposition has been subjected to all kinds of pressure in the last few months, from leaked clandestine sex tapes to dubious court cases and physical violence. As parliamentary… Read more »

Ukraine struggles to shake off legacy of kleptocracy

     

A case of possible influence-peddling under review by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau is hardly the only worrying sign for a government swept into power in 2014 on a wave of… Read more »

Peru’s fragile democracy still faces twin threats from Fujimorismo

     

Peru’s presidential election hung in the balance on Monday, with the economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (left) holding the narrowest of leads over Keiko Fujimori, daughter of a disgraced former president, The Financial Times… Read more »

China’s future: Xi’s ‘great rejuvenation’ is radical and risky

     

“China is simply not turning out as many had expected and have worked so long and hard to realize — a liberal China,” notes David Shambaugh, a professor of political… Read more »

Cultural Revolution nightmare still disturbs Chinese democracy dream

     

  The nightmare of the Cultural Revolution continues to disturb the dream of Chinese democracy, The Economist notes: The violence of the Cultural Revolution, and the many officials it claimed… Read more »

Venezuela’s ‘monstrously unique’ crisis

     

Developing countries, like teenagers, are prone to accidents. One pretty much expects them to suffer an economic crash, a political crisis, or both, with some regularity, according to the Carnegie… Read more »