Teachers’ unions may stop Mexican President Enrique Peña’s reform agenda with widespread new protests against his educational reforms. Peña wants to make teacher evaluations mandatory, and empower administrators to fire poorly performing teachers.  As early as last week, Peña’s team was certain that these reforms would pass through the country’s legislature, but in light of the protests its […]

After years in which California’s credit rating ranked among the worst in the nation, the state has completed a massive, $764 million bond sale in which it enjoyed quite favorable interest rates. The Wall Street Journal reports that the premium (the additional interest the state offers compared with AAA rated bonds) was 0.45 percent, down from […]

In a move calculated to avoid conflicts with France’s powerful unions, the French government announced yesterday a number of changes to the country’s pension system. While the official minimum retirement age of 62 will remain unchanged, the number of years of work required to collect a pension is set to rise from 41.5 to 43 […]

Did the Chinese Communist Party just drop a hint that reforms are coming? The political bureau of the Party said in an official statement today that it will “discuss deepening reform in an all-round way” at a November meeting of the Party’s central committee. Xinhua reports: Deepening reform in an all-round way concerns the overall […]

The Obama administration delayed yet another part of the health care law Tuesday, informing insurers that it won’t sign off on new health care plans until two weeks later than planned. Two weeks may not seem like a long time, but the new deadline in mid-September is running pretty hard up against the October 1st […]

“Industrial scale oil theft, sabotage and technical problems” have caused output from the oil-rich Niger delta to plummet to a four-year low, the FT reports, and that’s only the beginning of the story.Shell announced in July that thieves were stealing 60,000 barrels of oil every day—just from Shell’s lines. The Nigerian government, which gets 80 […]

Two and a half years ago, the UK committed itself to cutting its emissions by 50 percent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2025. It’s an aggressive goal, going even further than the EU-wide targets of 20 percent emissions reductions by 2020. But Britain’s ministers left themselves an out: if the government’s Climate Change Committee determined […]

Efficient health care tied to affordable cost, high quality, and universal access is possible, at least if you’re a country called Singapore. In April, Brookings Press published Affordable Excellence, the first “comprehensive system-level description” of the Singaporean health care system. Tyler Cowen is in Singapore this week, and he’s written a few posts on its health care, pivoting […]

Four years on, it’s time to start asking the question: Is this the rottenest economic recovery ever? GDP is steadily growing again, but the unemployment rate has been so bad that when it finally dropped below 8 percent last year it was touted as excellent news, despite coming nearly half a decade after the beginning […]

The White House has been indicating that any intervention in Syria would be solely for the purpose of punishing Assad for using chemical weapons against his people—that the goal of any retaliation is not regime change, and that the scope of the intervention would be measured in days and not weeks or months.Yet if Iran […]