Market Misses Upside on Merck

Strong third-quarter results and better sales for cancer and hepatitis C drugs suggest Merck’s rise could continue.

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Nintendo's Tough Switch Ahead

Nintendo will need more support from other game makers to make its new Switch console a success.

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Long-Awaited European Stock Rally May Be Here

European stocks haven’t lived up to expectations this year. That might make them more attractive.

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African economies are growing at very different speeds

HOW are sub-Saharan African economies doing? It depends on where you look, says the IMF in its latest survey of the continent, which is published today. Regional growth will slow to just 1.4% this year, the most sluggish pace for two decades. Things look grim in Nigeria, which is mired in recession. But Ivory Coast, a short flight away, is thundering along at a growth rate of 8%. Similar contrasts are found across the continent. Better to talk of two Africas, says the IMF, moving at different speeds.

The big divider is resources. As commodity prices have slumped, so too have the fortunes of big exporters. As a group, resource-rich countries will grow on average by 0.3% of GDP, says the IMF. Take oil-rich Angola, once the fastest-growing country on the continent: it will not grow at all this year, and is wrestling with inflation of 38%. Commodity-exporting countries saw the value of their exports to China almost halve...Continue reading

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Italy's Most Troubled Bank Offers Little to New Investors

The rehabilitation of Monte dei Paschi di Siena looks unexciting even if things go well.

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Amorepacific Looks Good Despite China's Tourism Makeover

As South Korean stocks linked to Chinese tourists fall on concerns of a curb from Beijing, companies with strong brand recognition among China’s consumers such as Amorepacific would be good bets for bargain hunters.

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How Joe Morrissey has capsized Richmond's mayoral race

RICHMOND, the capital of Virginia and of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War is today a majority-black city with a flourishing entertainment and cultural scene that is often celebrated in the national media. Its arty edginess has made it magnet for coffee-sipping, craft-beer coiffing, Vespa-riding millennials. But all that is currently being overshadowed by a bigger local story: an embarrassing mayoral election.

Richmond's election in November, when residents will pick a new mayor from seven candidates, including a former prosecutor and legislator who commuted from the jailhouse to the statehouse while doing time for having sex with a teenage girl, has put on display a sharply segmented city—one in which African-Americans control its politics and white people control its economy.

Rather than focusing on some tough issues—a burst of homicides, funding for struggling schools with high truancy rates and a replacement for its worn-out baseball stadium—the campaign is largely focused on an individual: Joe Morrissey, the frontrunner, whose checkered personal and professional history, going back more than two decades, might be expected to...Continue reading

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NetSuite Could Sour If Oracle Bid Is Lost

The cloud software company’s results make it difficult to argue for a higher offer.

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Apple Gets Polished Ahead of Results

Investor sentiment toward Apple has improved ahead of Tuesday’s earnings report even as a key streak is poised to snap.

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Online Brokers Can't Catch Up by Teaming Up

By acquiring rival Scottrade, TD Ameritrade can achieve needed economies of scale. But its fundamental challenges remain.

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Islamic State’s messianic apocalypse is postponed

THE fate of a small rural town in northern Syria might seem inconsequential when faced with a multinational assault on the group’s main stronghold, Mosul. But few places were more central to the image of Islamic State (IS). The jihadists lauded Dabiq as the locus, as cited in an obscure Hadith, or saying of the Prophet Muhammad, of the battle of the end of days; in their vision it would be an apocalyptic showdown between the self-styled caliphate’s faithful and Western crusaders. It named its glossy English-language e-zine after the town, and beheaded its victims, like Peter Kassig, an American aid worker, in its foothills. As the day of reckoning approached, observers reported that IS had fortified Dabiq with 1,200 fighters.

In the end, IS went with barely a whimper. The jihadists folded before the advance of Turkish-backed rivals backed after just a day’s battle. IS’s “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had foretold of the capitulation in a dream, explained apologists. IS’s propagandists even pre-empted the fall with the launch of a new English title, Rumiya, deferring the end-of-days battle until IS reaches...Continue reading

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Bond Trading Rebound Won't Save European Banks' Year

Investment banks should enjoy a recovery like U.S. peers, but last year’s washout isn’t hard to beat.

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Making sense of the Wallonian veto

IF CLEVELAND were given the right to veto any potential trade agreement between American and another country, how many trade agreements would ever be enacted? One reasonable guess is: none. If the federal government then deprived Cleveland of the right to veto trade agreements, would that be anti-democratic?

For those who missed the news: last week the parliament of Wallonia (one of the three regions which make up the state of Belgium) voted to block the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which is an ambitious trade deal negotiated between Canada and the European Union. Wallonia’s population is less than 1% of that of the EU has a whole: comparable to the share of America’s population residing in the Cleveland metropolitan area. It seems slightly perverse that so small an area could block so important a deal which had been so long in the making. Especially when the other party in the deal in question is Canada, seemingly as innocuous a trade partner as one could wish for.

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard University, says the vote is in large...Continue reading

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A Warning for Sky-High Bonds in Europe's PMI

Small shifts can matter a lot for markets. October’s flash eurozone PMI reading could be one of them.

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China's Big Insurance Buy Leaves Lots of Risk

With China Oceanside’s offer for U.S.-listed insurer Genworth Financial, a Chinese knight in shining armor has come to the rescue yet again. But it may not have made things safe for investors.

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The EU is reviewing the policy that makes its appliances so energy-efficient

EARLIER this year David Coburn, who sits in the European Parliament for the UK Independence Party, came up with a rather unusual argument for leaving the European Union: the quality of his morning toast. He claimed that EU regulation meant toasters had only “the power of one candle or something”, leaving his bread “all peely-wally” rather than nicely roasted. Proponents of Brexit latched on to the story as yet another example of continental meddling messing with time-honoured British traditions.

In fact, the EU does not yet regulate the energy consumption of toasters. But they are among the products currently being considered by the European Commission for inclusion in the Ecodesign Directive, the main EU policy instrument for improving the energy efficiency of products such as fridges, ovens and televisions. The directive compels manufacturers to improve efficiency and gradually phase out products that no longer meet the requirements. Ecodesign standards are complemented by energy labels to help consumers buy more efficient products that are cheaper to run. Between them, the products covered by the policy account for more than half of gross...Continue reading

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AT&T Dreams of a Hollywood Ending

AT&T is buying Time Warner to help it succeed in the future world of media consumption. In many ways it is already living in that world, and it isn’t doing all that well.

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Visa Stands Its Ground Against Rivals

Historically, Visa has beaten earnings expectations with uncanny regularity.

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Time for Investors to Grab the Rebound

Firmer global growth and a pickup in inflation are beginning to push earnings higher.

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Friendlier Skies Ahead for Airline Stocks

Mediocre business conditions might be good enough for airline investors.

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Will white Catholics break with tradition and vote for Clinton?

A NOTICE in the newsletter of a Catholic church in Bethesda, Maryland, a prosperous, largely white suburb of Washington, D.C., suggests that Catholic voters should consider one question above all others in 2016. “Who will do the most to protect and respect life and conversely, who will do the most to promote and even pay for the direct destruction of innocent life?” it reads.  

If a recent poll is anything to go by, however, white Catholics, who have long favoured Republican presidential candidates over Democratic ones will not vote for Donald Trump, who has cast himself as fiercely anti-abortion in 2016, but for Hillary Clinton. This would be a significant change.

Catholics, who constitute the largest religious body in America—and represent around a quarter of all voters—are often described as a swing voting group. In the past two elections they have narrowly voted Democratic; in 2004 they voted for George W. Bush. But it is hard to imagine them voting Republican again, without a big change of sentiment among Democratic-leaning Hispanics, who represent a third of all Catholics and a majority of millennial Catholics. However, white Catholics have in...Continue reading

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An ageing aircraft-carrier bound for Syria riles NATO along the way

RATHER too much is being made of the squadron of Russian warships, headed by the country’s sole aircraft-carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, that transited the English Channel on October 21st en route to Syria. The deployment was first announced back in July and is part of a regular rotation of Russian naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. To say, as did Michael Fallon, Britain’s defence secretary, that the Russians are seeking to test NATO’s capabilities borders on the absurd. The Russians are sailing in plain view and are only exercising their freedom-of-navigation rights, as the US Navy has on occasion in the South China Sea. The route down the North Sea is the obvious way for them to go. There is nothing particularly provocative about it, as long as the Russians don’t attempt to launch aircraft from the carrier into NATO airspace.

That is not to say that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, will not be enjoying the extensive media coverage and the expressions of concern from NATO officials that the cruise has elicited. But compared with the deliberate buzzing of NATO warships in the Baltic and probing runs into NATO airspace by...Continue reading

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On Mosul’s front line: “These car bombs are the Islamic State’s version of air strikes.”

 

THE battered pickup truck bounced and jolted across the field, kicking up plumes of dust before screeching to a halt next to an abandoned building. The machine-gunner jumped from the back, screaming at a group of Peshmerga fighters for help. “We got hit by a sniper. This man needs help. Quickly,” he yelled.

Two fighters dragged the wounded soldier from the truck. Grimacing in pain from the bullet that had shattered his hip, he managed to raise two bloody fingers in a limp victory salute, then slumped onto a mattress in the back of a makeshift ambulance that lurched across fields of golden grass towards a nearby field hospital.

Harassed by sniper fire and slowed down by the suicide bombers of Islamic State (IS), Kurdish and Iraqi forces have taken heavy casualties as they fight their way towards the key city of Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city and the place where the jihadists first announced the creation of their “caliphate” two years ago.

Villages freshly captured by the Iraqi army and Shia militias on the roads leading north to Mosul showed signs of the jihadists’ hasty retreat. Weapon caches had been...Continue reading

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Tears over the collapse of the EU-Canada trade deal

THE drab Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, where the European Union’s heads of government meet for their regular summits, is no stranger to drama, from 5am agreements on Greek debt to blazing rows over refugees. But on October 20th-21st, as the 28 leaders chewed over the finer points of EU migration and foreign policy, the real action was unfolding 40 miles away in Namur, capital of Belgium’s French-speaking Walloon region. Beneath the image of a strutting cockerel that looms over their parliamentary chamber, Wallonia’s deputies debated the latest attempt by Europe’s leaders to draw up a protocol to CETA, an EU-Canada trade and investment deal, that would satisfy their objections to some of its provisions. Under Belgium’s baroque constitutional arrangements all five regional parliaments must provide their assent for the federal government, which supports CETA, to give its backing.

But the Walloons would not be moved. (The sticking point appears to be a provision in the deal to provide legal protections for investors.) After flying in for emergency talks Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister, left Namur this afternoon in...Continue reading

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AT&T Rethinks Possible With Time Warner

Time Warner is an attractive media asset, but acquiring it would be a blockbuster of a gamble for AT&T.

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Why Portugal and DBRS Still Matter for Europe

Portugal has held on to its investment-grade rating from DBRS. Drama has been averted, but remains on the agenda.

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Presidential Tail Risks Tame Trading

Investors think they know how the election will turn out, but the risk of being wrong is keeping them from doing much of anything.

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Turkey’s Kurds are caught between an insurgency and a crackdown

A CENTURY and a half of Kurdish history stares at Altan Tan from the photographs in his office on the outskirts of Diyarbakir, the heart of Turkey’s restive south-east. His great-grandfather, a merchant who shuttled between Aleppo and Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, inspects the room from one frame. His father, tortured to death in a state prison after an army coup in 1980, looks up from another. Just two years ago Mr Tan, an engineer and member of parliament, had reason to think Turkey’s Kurds were on the verge of a brighter future. He was a key player in the peace negotiations between Turkey’s government and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which seemed about to bring the decades-long war between the government and the PKK to a close.

That was before the summer of 2015, when a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish army collapsed, unleashing the worst bloodletting in two decades. At least 2,100 people, many of them civilians, have died in the clashes since July 2015. Insurgent strongholds, including swathes of Diyarbakir’s historical centre, have been pummelled...Continue reading

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BAT-Reynolds: A Modest Premium For Modest Cost Savings

Given the limited scope for cost-cutting, BAT can’t afford to pay much more than a 20% premium for Reynolds American

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This Chinese Auto Company May Get Caught for Speeding

Geely Automobile’s supercharged growth has amped up investors’ expectations. But the market is primed for a slowdown.

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Money has fled Ukraine for decades

A simple, surprisingly good election forecasting method

PUNDITS, journalists, campaign hands and others spend an awesome amount of time during election season trying to work out what factors will swing the vote one way or another. Could it be a candidate's likeability? Differences in policy? Her ad strategy? His habit of insulting large swathes of the electorate?

Campaign choices matter, but political science research suggests that the lay of the electoral land is largely shaped by factors beyond candidates' control. People vote retrospectively, based on their perception of how things are going for them and those around them. But their perceptions are shaped by all sorts of things. As Christopher Achen, of Princeton University, and Larry Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, describe in Democracy for Realists, a book published earlier this year, voters sometimes punish politicians for bad weather, random misfortunes—an outbreak of shark attacks appears to have cost Woodrow Wilson votes in the 1916 election—and the performance of the local American football team.

Perhaps more importantly, voters are extremely myopic. They care about their economic welfare, and especially about whether or not their...Continue reading

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The presidential race enters the classroom

AMERICA’S haywire presidential election is worrying the country's teachers. The norm is for educators to tread lightly in the classroom when it comes to politics. In New York City, a chancellor’s regulation holds that while “on duty or in contact with students” teachers are bound to “maintain a posture of complete neutrality with respect to all candidates”. This means they “may not wear buttons, pins, articles of clothing, or any other items advocating a candidate, candidates, slate of candidates or political organisation/committee”. In 2008, the teacher’s union challenged this rule in court, asserting that it violates educators’ First Amendment right to free expression. The federal judge rejected the plea, noting that while “school officials may not take a sledge hammer to freedom of expression”, they have a legitimate interest in “avoiding the entanglement of their public educational mission with partisan politics”.

The worry is not a small one. Teachers dressed in partisan costume are not particularly well suited to lead an impartial discussion of political controversies. Whether the button says “Lock her up” or “Dump Trump”, a classroom...Continue reading

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Investors Charging Into American Express Should Think Again

American Express beat estimates for third-quarter earnings, but still faces strong competitive pressure.

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ECB and Markets: A Dangerous Obsession

Mario Draghi gave markets no reason to get wound up about coming ECB action. If they do so, they will only have themselves to blame.

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Advice for the vice squad

NOT long ago even members of the royal family were cowed by Saudi Arabia’s religious police, formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The mutaween, as they are called in Arabic, roamed the malls and streets, enforcing the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law. Their zeal was matched only by their cruelty. Most notoriously, in 2002 15 schoolgirls died in Mecca after members of the mutaween allegedly prevented them from fleeing a burning building because they were not covered up.

Today the mutaween are a weakened force, partly thanks to social media. Saudis have taken to filming their excesses and posting the footage online. Anyone with a smartphone can watch these courageous guardians of virtue harassing women for wearing nail polish. This has provoked a backlash. In April the government declared that the mutaween could no longer stop, pursue or arrest people and ought to be “gentle and kind” in their conduct.

Still, as the government enacts painful...Continue reading

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The uneasy crown

Still plucky, but more nasty

“A TRUE triumph of progress over regression,” claimed King Abdullah, boasting about Jordan’s elections from the UN podium in New York on September 20th, the day his kingdom went to the polls. Many Jordanians thought otherwise. Despite a relentless public-information campaign and the participation of the pro-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood for the first time in nine years, turnout slumped to a dismal 37%, down from 56% at the election before. In parts of Amman, the capital, barely one in five of those eligible to vote bothered to cast a ballot.

The low turnout is a sign that many people saw the elections as a waste of time. The king swiftly reappointed the same unelected cabinet with only a few minor alterations, and since then has proceeded to push through a host of decrees. Wise but unpopular decisions to buy gas from Israel and to revise the school curriculum by removing troublesome Koranic verses were issued as decrees.

Ever since it was fashioned by Britain after the first world war, Jordan has served as a pro-Western outpost and a buffer keeping its petulant neighbours at bay. But...Continue reading

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A whites-only “Eden Project” in South Africa

A racially pure enclave of one

JAQUI GARY GRADWELL sports a bushy beard in the style of his voortrekker ancestors—the pioneers who fled British rule in ox-drawn wagons. Also in the spirit of the voortrekkers, he vows to lead his people away from oppression. Afrikaner culture is under threat in the new South Africa, he reckons. White people face “genocide”. So Mr Gradwell (pictured) wants to lead like-minded whites—40,000 of them, he predicts—to a farm in a remote part of the Eastern Cape to live together in an agrarian idyll.

A promotional video for Die Eden Projek (The Eden Project) contrasts images of black rioters, black criminals and President Jacob Zuma with soft-focus photos of happy white families with tractors and chickens. It does not, however, mention Mr Gradwell’s somewhat chequered past, which includes being convicted of firearms offences while living in America.

Mr Gradwell’s plan has generated many headlines but little support. Disgruntled whites already have an enclave, but hardly anyone wants to live there. Orania,...Continue reading

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Poor law

GODFREY EBREYU has a captive audience, in every sense. A throng of inmates has gathered in the prison yard in Gulu, northern Uganda, as he explains the intricacies of plea-bargaining. Like 55% of prisoners in Uganda, these men are awaiting trial; some have been here for years. They are still asking questions when, at four o’clock, they are ushered back into their crowded cells for the night.

Mr Ebreyu is a paralegal working for the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, a Ugandan NGO. Paralegals have some legal training, but they are not lawyers. Across Africa they are helping to unclog courts, resolve disputes and bring justice to the most vulnerable, from suspects deprived of their liberty to farmers robbed of their lands. Some are paid, others are volunteers; they typically work for civil-society groups and tend to be locals.

Their work is desperately needed. Africa’s people are mostly rural and poor; its fully qualified lawyers are mostly urban and expensive. In Uganda just one in a hundred disputes ever reaches a lawyer. When the civil war ended in Sierra Leone, the country’s legal fraternity could have fitted in a couple of buses....Continue reading

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Front man

Unacknowledged legislator

THE crowds in Mariupol, a factory town on the front line in eastern Ukraine, began lining up at six in the morning. It was late spring, and the rock group Okean Elzy were playing. “You might only see them once in your life,” said a young boy in line. Some 30,000 people turned out to see the band and its front man, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk (pictured). “He’s now the voice of the younger generation, the voice of the agents of change,” says Yaroslav Hrytsak, a Ukrainian historian.

Mr Vakarchuk is the son of a physicist from Lviv in western Ukraine, and his most significant recent performance was not a concert but a speech marking his return to the political arena. (He served a one-year stint in parliament between 2007 and 2008.)

Taking a stand against the identity politics that Ukrainian leaders have long used to distract from failed reforms, Mr Vakarchuk articulated a vision of Ukrainian identity for the 21st century. “We need to stop building a state based on blood patriotism, and begin building a state based on constitutional patriotism,” he declared. “We shouldn’t be united by...Continue reading

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In Russia, privatisation can mean selling one state-owned company to another

Pumping up the price

WHEN Russia’s government floated the idea that its supposedly ambitious privatisation plans should include selling Bashneft, a state-controlled oil firm, to Rosneft, another state-controlled oil firm, many officials were opposed. One presidential adviser called it “idiocy”. Even President Vladimir Putin said it was “not the best option”. But Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, is a persuasive man. On October 9th the government announced that Rosneft’s 330 billion rouble ($5.3 billion) bid had been accepted.

The main imperative was the government’s urgent need for money. The quasi-privatisation “helps them to resolve the budget problem, but doesn’t reduce the role of the state in the economy,” says Oleg Kouzmin of Renaissance Capital, an investment bank. Rosneft’s offer was above the value an independent analyst had put on the company. Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining privately held oil firm, said his company could not have matched such a high bid, but for a state-owned company like Rosneft that is too big to fail, “it doesn’t matter how much they...Continue reading

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The Five Star Movement is chaotic, but as popular as ever

THE funeral in Milan on October 15th of Dario Fo, Italy’s irrepressibly subversive Nobel laureate for literature (see Obituary), may have seemed like a commemoration of the old, Marxist left. On the rain-sodden Piazza del Duomo, clenched fists were raised, a Che Guevara banner unfurled and the great jester dispatched to his grave with a rendering of “Bella Ciao”, the anthem of Italy’s partisans in the second world war.

Yet the best-known mourners were not Marxists at all. They included the founder of the Five Star Movement (M5S), Beppe Grillo (pictured); the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi; and other leading figures in what has become Italy’s main opposition group. Late in life, Mr Fo transferred his enthusiasm from the radical left to the M5S. He even wrote a book with Mr Grillo and the party’s co-founder, the late Gianroberto Casaleggio, explaining its ideas. These include attacking corruption in Italy’s mainstream parties, transcending the conventional distinction between right...Continue reading

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France picked a funny time to adopt America’s political primary system

WEEK after week, Europeans turn their gaze to the American presidential election with consternation and bewilderment. How is it that the world’s second-biggest democracy, with its orderly primary system, comes up with a candidate like Donald Trump? The sense of stupeur is perhaps most acute for the French, whose presidential system resembles America’s more than it does Europe’s parliamentary democracies. For the first time ever, both of the two main French political parties—the Socialists and the centre-right Republicans—are about to stage American-style primaries to select candidates for next spring’s presidential election. French parties used to pick candidates based on a mysterious alchemy of deal-making, seniority and clout. The advent of primaries is altering campaign politics, but not in the way that was expected.

Donald se Trompe

The immediate concern in France is not that the primaries will yield a Trump à la française. The country already has one of those in Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (FN), who firmly occupies the role of the populist,...Continue reading

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Let the haggling begin

“THIS is betrayal,” thundered Saskatchewan’s long-serving premier, Brad Wall. His grievance: the decision this month by Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to set a minimum price for carbon emissions that all provinces would have to adhere to. Since taking office nearly a year ago, Mr Trudeau and his ministers have spent much of their time consulting the provinces (and ordinary Canadians) on such issues as judicial reform and defence. His carbon-price announcement marks a transition from talking to acting, and a new contentious phase in relations between the federal government and the ten provinces. Canada’s grand political bazaar, in which the prime minister and the premiers strike the bargains that determine how the country will be governed, is again open for business.

Despite Mr Wall’s profession of shock, the carbon-price policy is no surprise. Mr Trudeau has made it plain that, unlike his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, he takes the threat of climate change seriously. One of his first acts in office was to agree last December to sign the Paris climate accord, under which Canada is to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases...Continue reading

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The red-nosed gold rush

ONE recent Saturday afternoon three performers, dressed in clownish finery, clambered out of a rusty 1950s pickup truck in a suburb of Havana and spent the next hour cavorting, breakdancing and sashaying for the amusement of a dozen children. One of the troupe, Ángel Kike Díaz, a cartoon-voice star and stage puppeteer, is a Cuban celebrity. As a clown employed by the state, he makes a salary worth $30 a month. A single children’s birthday party will pay him nearly that much.

With inducements like that, clowning is a growth industry in Cuba. A timid economic liberalisation has created a small entrepreneurial class and attracted foreigners with money to spend on private displays of pranks and pratfalls. It has also opened up the clowning profession. “Clowns”, “party entertainers”, and “party-service providers” are among the 181 jobs that may now be done by self-employed workers. At least 200 clowns romp around Havana at such events as quinceañeras (15th-birthday celebrations for girls), weddings and feasts honouring the saints of Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion.

Clowning is a Cuban vocation, brought by...Continue reading

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Casual Mondays to Fridays

MORE than half of all workers in Latin America are employed off the books in the informal economy. That share has barely fallen since 2003. Informal workers are excluded from safety-net programmes such as pension plans, unemployment insurance and some public-health services.

A report by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, shows one reason why workers remain in the shadows: the cost of formality is too high (see chart). A large share of employees—from at least 20% in Bolivia to at least 80% in Honduras—earn wages that are below their country’s statutory minimum. Social-security contributions, if low-wage workers paid them, would consume much of their incomes. For the poorest tenth, contributions owed by both employers and employees would average three-quarters of their wages (if those workers paid the amount levied on formal employees earning the minimum wage). In five of the 18 countries covered by the report, that share would be more than 100%.

Latin American tax burdens are not excessive by rich-world standards. For workers earning average wages in the formal sector, the tax take is less than 22%. Income taxes begin...Continue reading

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A model Latin American

THIS has been a good year for Joaquín Torres-García, a Uruguayan artist who died in 1949 but whose reputation continues to wax. Last winter the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York staged a panoramic exhibition of his work; after summering in Madrid, the exhibition opened this month at the Picasso Museum in Malaga. Last November one of his large “constructivist” panels, as he called them, sold for $2.1m at auction, a record price for his work. A more intimate exhibition at the Guillermo de Osma gallery in Madrid showcases both his sketches and his craftsmanship as a maker of wooden sculpture and toys.

This interest in Torres-García shows that an artist who sometimes seemed behind his times was, in many ways, ahead of them. He was a bridge between Latin America and the diverse vanguards of the School of Paris. More important, he gave birth to a radical tradition of abstract and geometric art in South America. To outsiders, Latin American art means the Mexican muralists, Frida Kahlo and “indigenism” (the highlighting of pre-Columbian roots). But the abstract tradition is coming into its own. This week Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a collector,...Continue reading

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An empty throne

WHITE tents encircle Sanam Luang, a vast grassy parade ground in the heart of Bangkok. From their shade volunteers distribute simple meals, cold water and ice creams to crowds dressed in black or white. Off-duty rescue workers stir deep basins of diced chicken, turning the sizzling mixture with scoops the size of spades. A soldier in camouflage hands out sweets.

The refreshments have been laid on for mourners waiting to pay their respects to Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s king, who died in hospital on October 13th. His body rests in the Grand Palace, an enormous white-walled complex just across the road, where it will stay for the next year. Visitors to the palace kneel before a picture of the king; soon they will be allowed into a throne room containing his coffin. Next year Sanam Luang will be the site of the royal cremation pyre—an ornate wooden pavilion which will probably take weeks to build.

Immediately after the king’s death was announced all television stations suspended their normal programming in favour of documentaries about him, streamed in monochrome from a government pool. Newspapers and magazines started publishing in...Continue reading

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On the brink

THE state of South Australia is often in the vanguard of social change. In 1894 it became the first place in the world to let women stand for parliament; in 1976, the first English-speaking jurisdiction to ban rape within marriage. It was the first place in Australia to decriminalise gay sex and outlaw racial discrimination. Now its parliament may make it the first Australian state to legalise assisted dying.

This week two members of the state parliament introduced a bill that would allow terminally ill patients to end their lives with medical assistance, provided that doctors thought they had six months or less to live, that their suffering was “intolerable” and that it could not be relieved by any “reasonably available medical treatment”. Assisted dying is legal only in Colombia, Canada, a few European countries and a handful of American states. But the practice has a long history in Australia. In 1996 the Northern Territory became the first place in the world to legalise it. Four people made use of the law in the nine months before Australia’s federal government overturned it and passed a law to prevent Australia’s three self-governing...Continue reading

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No pain, no gain

THE Mejiro Birth House in a northern district of Tokyo is eerily quiet: no babies crying, no wails of women in labour. That, explains Yuko Hoshino, the chief midwife, is because it is empty. Only four to six babies are born there each month, compared with 14 to 16 a few years ago. The problem is not just Japan’s low birth rate. “Fewer women want a natural birth today,” she says ruefully. “They go with doctors in hospitals rather than with midwives in birth houses.”

The culture of maternity in Japan is slowly becoming more like the rest of the rich world, but several practices differ. Women are generally treated as fragile during their pregnancy. But during labour itself they are expected to suffer. Painkillers are doled out sparingly, if at all. Doctors say growing numbers of women are keen to have an epidural (an anaesthetic injected into the spine), but few obstetric centres, hospitals included, offer them, and almost never outside normal working hours. The payment of ¥420,000 ($4,053) that the national health-insurance scheme makes towards the cost of having a baby would not typically cover one, anyway.

For most women, however,...Continue reading

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