MEXICO CITY – Mexico is poised to become Latin America’s economic star in the coming decade. The government’s recent reform of the energy sector will contribute directly to economic performance by reducing the cost of manufacturing. In the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the resulting increase in manufacturing competitiveness promises to boost Mexico’s growth substantially.

President Barack Obama has responded to the horrible actions by the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) and to the sharp turn in American public opinion by promising to degrade and eventually destroy this powerful terrorist group. But, not surprisingly, Mr Obama promises to achieve this without putting any American combat troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria and without any significant increase in military spending. What is happening in this battle reflects a more broadly misguided and underfunded US defence policy.

An increasing number of American companies are making plans to shift their headquarters to Europe, in order to escape the United States’ uniquely unfavorable corporate tax rules. So what should US policymakers do?

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors recently warned of the possibility of excesses in asset markets but concluded that, at least for now, if there is a need to act it will not be done by raising interest rates but by relying on "macroprudential" policy tools to reduce systemic risk.

The US Federal Reserve fears that a proposed law requiring it to use a formal rule to guide monetary policy would limit its independence, while the bill’s proponents argue that it would produce more predictable growth with low inflation. Who is right?

India’s recent general election could be the most important positive economic event of 2014. Indian voters decisively rejected the Congress party, which had governed India virtually without interruption since it gained independence from Britain in 1947. They are likely to be happy they did.

Now that the US economy is past the impact of the terrible weather earlier this year, output appears to be on track to grow at a healthy pace. But the Fed will face a key challenge in the next two years as it seeks to control inflationary pressure stemming from higher lending by commercial banks to businesses and households.

Thomas Piketty has recently attracted widespread attention for his claim that capitalism will now lead inexorably to an increasing inequality of income and wealth unless there are radical changes in taxation. Although his book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," has been praised by those who advocate income redistribution, his thesis rests on a false theory of how wealth evolves in a market economy, a flawed interpretation of U.S. income-tax data, and a misunderstanding of the current nature of household wealth.

Despite the recent upturn in some of its member countries, the eurozone’s economy remains in the doldrums, with the overall rate of annual GDP growth this year likely to be only slightly higher than 1%. Even Germany’s growth rate is below 2%, while GDP is still declining in France, Italy, and Spain. And this slow rate of growth has kept the eurozone’s total unemployment rate at a painfully high 12%.

Janet Yellen, like Ben Bernanke before her, believes that the Federal Reserve should communicate the reasons for its current policies and the strategy of its future policy actions. And so we have been told the basic plans are for gradually reducing the volume of large-scale asset purchases, and for keeping short-term interest rates low -- "for some time," as she said in her speech on Monday -- in order to stimulate employment and raise the inflation rate toward 2%.