Opinion

By Dasarathi Mishra The Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) study was developed by the World Bank in 2003. The first report on “Ease of Doing Business” was published in 2003, covering 133 economies. Over time, its coverage expanded to 190 economies, becoming a widely used...

By Santosh Kumar Mohapatra International Labour Day, also known as Workers' Day or May Day, is observed worldwide to honour the contributions and rights of workers across all sectors, manual, skilled, and professional. The day underscores the importance of fair wages, safe working conditions, and...

By Anwesh Satpathy The temporal and the spiritual are now clashing. Donald Trump is the first President of the United States to have openly and explicitly declared the occupant of St. Peter’s chair to be “weak on crime,” and worse, that he supports Iran’s right...

By Frederik Obermaier & Bastian Obermayer When John Doe, the anonymous whistleblower behind the Pan ama Papers, approached us, he handed us an opportunity. When the resulting investigation into the offshore finance industry was published on 3 April, 2016, the world was handed a test....

India lost 247 billion potential labour hours to extreme heat in 2024. Agriculture absorbed 66% of that loss. Construction accounted for 20%. The income equivalent, calculated by the Lancet Countdown in its 2025 report, was $194 billion. That figure was 124% higher than the annual...

When missiles fill the skies over West Asia, the tremors reach every household’s electricity and petrol bill. The ongoing crisis in the region has exposed the vulnerability of India, which is the world's third-largest consumer of crude oil, importing nearly 89% of its requirement, i.e....

Jewish history includes three episodes of flourishing in exile: the Babylonian diaspora’s great academies; the centuries-long experiment in Moorish and then Christian Spain; and the American Jewish experience, particularly after World War II. But the American experience has come under intensifying threat, and the causes...

Melvin Durai Insurance fraud is nothing new: it has existed since the days of the cavemen. That’s when a man named Bongah collected shiny stones from his fellow cavemen, as he convinced each of them to buy wife insurance. If someone steals your wife, he...

Claudia Sanhueza For decades, global power emanated from Europe and the United States. That was certainly my view when I first set foot in the Northern Hemisphere as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. But managing Chile’s international economic relations under former President...

Luciene Pereira The standard policy response to slums—relocate people, bulldoze the settlement, and build public housing elsewhere—is older than the slums themselves. It has never worked. The logic seems straightforward. Slums are viewed as unsanitary, unsafe, and visually jarring. If you want to build a...