Sometimes, it seems that all stories now connect to Qatar. Last week, it was David Beckham signing for the super-rich club Paris Saint-Germain, owned by the Qatar Investment Authority. Earlier last month, it was revealed that al-Jazeera, the hugely powerful Qatari broadcaster, was launching in America, where it was once known as "terror TV". Why has this tiny Gulf state – the richest country in the world per capita, largely thanks to natural gas – become so active, so attention-grabbing?

Americans are not alone in worrying that their economic futures are headed in the wrong direction. Afghans, too, fear that the next several years will bring a business tailspin that will see recent gains eked out by small and medium companies dissolve amid security woes and a sharp pullback in international largesse and, of course, foreign forces.

Iran is set for a second round of talks with international negotiators in Baghdad on May 23 on its nuclear program. Some experts and U.S. officials believe that recently imposed sanctions on the country's financial and oil industries are taking an economic toll and encouraging Iran to negotiate.

Last week, Egypt's interim government renewed negotiations with the IMF to secure a $3.2 billion loan to alleviate its liquidity crisis. The loan will come with conditions, and will only partially address the projected $11 billion in financing that Egypt will need over the next two years. Subsidies will be front and center in negotiations.

Turkey has one of the world’s zippiest economies, but it is too reliant on hot money

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.

It has become commonplace for people to talk about the middle class and its role in economic and societal transformations, and many have credited this group with playing a role in the current changes sweeping the region. But despite the newfound ease with which people talk about it, there are those who argue that the middle class has dwindled and that its values and the role it plays in Arab societies have changed.

Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, is the founding director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. This article first appeared in Le Monde.

From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars.

Food prices are skyrocketing across the world, and last month, they peaked to the highest levels since the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization began indexing them in 1990. In the Middle East, wheat prices are playing a role in the ongoing unrest, particularly in Egypt, the world's largest wheat importer.