The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded jointly to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their work in development economics. In the mid-1990’s at Harvard University, Michael Kremer began studying the nature of poverty by the application of randomized trials, a technique that is commonly used in other fields of practical […]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) held its annual meeting this month in Washington in collaboration with the World Bank. In a closing statement, the policy-setting committee for the 189-nation IMF commented that global growth should accelerate next year, although officials acknowledged that a range of factors could undermine that forecast, including continued trade disputes and […]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed that “history is a great fugue in which the voices of nations one after the other emerge”. The Roman Empire with its classical civilization was dominant some two thousand years ago until its ultimate collapse in the fifth century. Europe was the center of culture and enlightenment in the period […]