By Hilal Elver and Melissa Shapiro GENEVA — Food is a powerful storyteller. Our diet signals whether we cook at home, shop locally, prefer inexpensive dishes or even think about what we eat. But the consumer side of mealtime is just one of food’s many plot lines.

By Johan Rockström, Jørgen Randers and Per Espen StoknesSTOCKHOLM — Nearly 50 years ago, the Club of Rome’s report “Limits to Growth” warned that if economic growth continued apace without regard for the environment, the world could face ecological and economic collapse in the 21

By Ann Aerts and Harald NusserBASEL — In his recent best-selling book “Factfulness”, the late international health expert Hans Rosling shows that horrors such as natural disasters, oil spills and battlefield deaths are trending steeply downward, and that harvest yields, literacy

By Kemal Dervi and Caroline ConroyWASHINGTON, DC — Since World War II’s end, trade has grown 50 per cent faster than global GDP, owing largely to successive rounds of liberalisation under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which was previously the General Agreeme

Monica Araya and Carlos Manuel RodriguezSAN JOSÉ — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body tasked with providing scientific evidence and consensus on climate change and its implications for decision makers and the public, has just issued its

By Mahmoud Mohieldin and Rabah ArezkiWASHINGTON, DC — The Arab world has a long tradition of commerce and enterprise. Yet, since achieving independence, many Arab countries have adopted state-led development models that have left their economies overly reliant on the government.

Shirin Ebadi and Christophe DeloirePARIS — On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, affirming the view that “the will of the people”, democracy, should form the basis of any government.

By Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer CAMBRIDGE — Over the last decade, research by many economists, including us, arrived at a broadly shared narrative of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

By Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus  GENEVA — It was just a century ago that the Spanish flu epidemic spread across the world and killed tens of millions of people.