Economist

“LIKE SHOE polish”, is how one oilman describes Uganda’s black stuff. It is waxy when heated and solid at room temperature. Some 6bn barrels lie in the western region around Lake Albert, of…

THERE ARE two ways to talk about politics. One describes the dry mechanics of government. The language of bills and ballots, cabinets and coalitions, is similar the world over. The other is…

AT THE HEART of economics is a belief in the virtues of open competition as a way of using the resources you have in the most efficient way you can. Thanks to the power of that insight,…

AT DUSK ON February 27th a group of young men dressed as football players were kicking a ball around a pitch besides an Ebola treatment centre in Butembo, a city in the east of the…

ALMOST TWO years ago Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tycoon, broke all the rules of investing by setting up a new vehicle to back tech firms. The Vision Fund was unusual in several ways. Worth…

“THE BIRTHDAY of a new world is at hand.” Ever since Thomas Paine penned those words in 1776, America has seen itself as the land of the new—and Europe as a continent stuck in the past.…

THE NEWS could not have come at a worse time for Benny Gantz, the main challenger to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. Less than four weeks before Israelis go to the polls it was…

MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES in Nairobi spent much of last year knocking things down. Shopping malls, petrol stations and apartment blocks were levelled; bulldozers cut through slums, leaving tens…

THE FIRST great surge of foreign interest in Africa, dubbed the “scramble”, was when 19th-century European colonists carved up the continent and seized Africans’ land. The second was during…

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 20th century’s ideological contest seemed over. Capitalism had won and socialism became a byword for economic failure and political…