In The News

South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, China and Japan say they plan to shift out of US treasuries. The reasons vary: for some bankers, Treasuries are not bringing the required rate of return, particularly with a depreciating dollar; for others, now is a good time to pay down debt or help finance domestic industry. But given their large holdings, Asian countries need to ensure that any sell-off does not...

Multinational corporations have employed different global corporate strategies in their efforts to adapt to the growing mobility of capital resources. Originally, the approach was to use economies of scale to compete in foreign countries with large domestic markets. Large firms can use their size to average fixed costs over many more products, bringing overall costs down compared to their smaller...

Conventional economic wisdom holds that foreign investment and trade boost economic growth and help alleviate poverty in developing countries. So why is it that some countries that seem quite open to the outside world are stagnating economically? David Dollar, Director of Development Policy at the World Bank, writes that a comparison of economic conditions in several Chinese cities points to...