CAIRO – Last year’s events in Egypt and Tunisia drew the curtain on a tottering old order and delivered much of the Arab world into a long-awaited new era. But what that new era will look like remains very much an open question, given the many challenges that the region’s countries still face.

NEW HAVEN – Today, fears are growing that China and India are about to be the next victims of the ongoing global economic carnage. This would have enormous consequences. Asia’s developing and newly industrialized economies grew at an 8.5% average annual rate over 2010-11 – nearly triple the 3% growth elsewhere in the world. If China and India are next to fall, Asia would be at risk, and it would be hard to avoid a global recession.

If there is anyone who should be angered by Standard & Poor's raft of eurozone downgrades , it would seemingly be the prime minister of Italy, whose debt was cut two notches with a warning of more to come. But on the first trading day after the credit rating agency's verdict, Mario Monti – a respected economist who became Italy's technocratic premier after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi in November – is buoyant.

Based on its regular economic and monetary analyses, the Governing Council decided at its meeting on 12 January 2012 to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged, following the 25 basis point decreases on 3 November and 8 December 2011. The information that has become available since early December broadly confi rms the previous assessment of the Governing Council. Infl ation is likely to stay above 2% for several months to come, before declining to below 2%. At the same time, the underlying pace of monetary expansion remains moderate. As expected, ongoing fi nancial market tensions continue to dampen economic activity in the euro area, while, according to some recent survey indicators, there are tentative signs of a stabilisation in activity at low levels.

The Mexican economy has recovered somewhat from a scorching recession imported from America, but is still hobbled by domestic monopolies and cartels

Exclusive interview with Mallam Lamido Aminu Sanusi, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria

BEIJING -- In recent months, bearish sentiment about the Chinese economy has surged, owing largely to three conjectures.

RUSSELS – European policymakers like to extol the strength of the eurozone: relative to the United States, it has a much lower fiscal deficit (4% of GDP, compared to almost 10% for the US). Moreover, unlike the US, the eurozone does not have an external deficit, which means that the monetary union holds enough savings to finance all of its members’ budget deficits and resolve their debt problems.