America’s recent choices are blunting its edge. The FDA has suffered high turnover among senior officials, including the resignation of Marty Makary, its head. Decision-making has been politicised: firms can receive “priority vouchers” that speed up reviews in return for lowering their prices and investing in domestic manufacturing. Funding for the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, has been slashed. Research programmes have been cancelled for ideological reasons. At the same time, immigration policies are making America a less attractive destination for the scientists on whom the industry depends, including many talented researchers from China. America should fix those problems rather than locking out Chinese innovation. The best world for patients is one in which both China and America develop cheap and effective drugs. Diseases cross borders. So should their cures. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/06/18/dont-restrict-chinese-biotech
India’s new economy still faces an old problem Family-run conglomerates make the stock market a tricky place to invest June 18th 2026 Arecord-breaking initial public offering is heading for the stock market. Retail investors are expected to pile in. The company’s prospects depend upon a single influential businessman, trusted by his devotees to come good, but reviled by his detractors. This is not America and SpaceX but India and Jio, a company that brought hundreds of millions of Indians online and may soon list. It is a thrilling story of the new Indian economy, featuring a tech entrepreneur hoping to get rich and ordinary Indians using the stock market to get a stake in his success. Yet beside all the reasons to celebrate sits one big reason to worry: India’s corporate governance is dismal.
Problems dog India’s family-run conglomerates. As we report, the Tata Group, long the gold standard of corporate probity, has been consumed by a boardroom drama. The regulator may force it to list, too. Gautam Adani, perhaps India’s best-connected infrastructure mogul, has spent years battling allegations that have cast a pall over his business success. Reliance, the parent company of Jio and much else, has an issue with succession. The three children of its boss, Mukesh Ambani, are on the board and in prominent operating roles. Yet the empire still seems to depend on Mr Ambani. Family-run conglomerates dominate India’s economy; the three most prominent could be joined by the Godrejs, Mahindras, Birlas and many others. Promoters, who control listed companies, still hold roughly half the equity on the National Stock Exchange; the share of “free-float” is among the lowest globally. The regulator has changed the rules to let Jio list by floating just 2.5% of its shares. That may help bring giant firms to market, but it raises awkward questions about price discovery, market discipline and shareholders’ rights when only a sliver of a company is available for trading. This matters beyond the wealthy enclaves of South Mumbai. Between 2020 and 2026 the number of Indian retail investors rose from around 40m to 130m. First-time investors are now being asked to entrust their savings to
companies whose governance they have little power to influence. When promoters dominate boards, related-party transactions, opaque group structures and succession decisions can be shaped around family interests rather than the company’s. No wonder many Indians would still rather put their trust in gold. Governance also matters to Indians who could never dream of opening a brokerage account. Weak governance raises the cost of capital and makes it harder for their country to develop. India wants more foreign money, deeper domestic markets and a broader equity-owning culture, all of which is harder to achieve with dynastic leadership and pliant boards. The government rightly boasts that India is “the world’s fastest-growing large economy” yet it still struggles to attract foreign capital. The sort of investment that leads to durable growth requires India to be an easy place to do business for all, not just a handful of well-connected families. That means independent boards with real authority; tougher scrutiny of related-party transactions; clearer disclosure of group debt, guarantees and cross-holdings; succession plans that allocate responsibility rather than merely anoint heirs; and stronger protection for minority shareholders. Institutional investors should act more like stewards and less like passive passengers in a soaring market. Investors, whether in India or overseas, should not have to worry about family dramas to buy into India’s growth story. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/06/18/indias-new-economy-still-faces-an- old-problem
Were we too quick to attack “Gen Z socialism”? Also this week Trump and judges, crime in Britain, “Star Trek” and war, Ethiopia’s prime minister, edible medical devices June 18th 2026 Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.comFind out more about how we process your letter The Economist was too quick to attack “Gen-Z socialism” (June 6th). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani aren’t cold war socialists committed to central planning, vanguardism and foreign dictatorships. They are democratic pragmatists who support civil and political liberties, good governance and expanded public services. This is the stuff of “sewer socialism”, not Stalinism. Today’s socialists want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency because they believe in freedom of movement, and because masked thugs are kidnapping people off the streets.
The push to tax billionaires comes not from a zero-sum mentality, but from witnessing massive wealth weaponised against liberal democracy itself. Like its namesake, a Green New Deal seeks to save capitalism from capitalists, and cool the planet too. Universal health care is no more a threat to American liberalism than it was to the British kind. Finally, The Economist itself has warned of the risks apartheid poses to democratic legitimacy. The horrors in Gaza have just awakened liberals to this danger. These can all be defended on liberal grounds. There are illiberal ideas on the left, but it is the liberal ideas that are attracting followers. We should ask ourselves why we so often find that socialists express our values better than our fellow liberals. Paul CriderAssociate editorLiberal CurrentsSan Francisco Many young people in wealthy countries are frustrated by high housing costs, inflation and economic uncertainty. Yet some of the remedies now gaining popularity—price controls, wealth taxes, nationalisations and greater state intervention—look very different when viewed from Argentina. For much of the past century Argentina experimented with the policies now being rediscovered elsewhere. Price controls repeatedly failed to contain inflation and created shortages. Subsidies intended to make energy affordable discouraged investment, contributing to electricity blackouts and gas shortages. Import restrictions were imposed to protect domestic industry, yet they made it difficult to obtain consumer goods. Perhaps most damaging was the erosion of confidence in private property and markets. Repeated interventions, confiscations and nationalisations weakened long-term investment and prevented the development of deep capital markets. Young people in advanced economies worry about unaffordable housing; many Argentines never even had access to a functioning mortgage market. The appeal of Gen-Z socialism is easy to understand. The lessons of countries that have lived under similar ideas are less appealing. Argentina’s experience suggests that prosperity is not undermined by too much economic freedom, but by too little of it.
Pedro VolpeBuenos Aires More letters on this topic can be found at economist.com/genzsocialism Chief Justice John Roberts dismisses accusations that the Supreme Court has become “politicised”, you say (“Where the justices draw the line”, May 30th). At his confirmation hearing, Mr Roberts disingenuously compared the role of chief justice to a baseball umpire. This was deliberate sophistry. The baseball strike zone is objective; an umpire’s officiating philosophy is irrelevant. These days an automated system can call balls and strikes. A much better analogy is that of a soccer referee assessing a contested tackle or a basketball referee calling a “travel”, decisions that are subjective and allow room for an official’s personal opinion to shape the outcome. Moreover, sports referees, apparently like Supreme Court Justices, suffer from social-compliance bias, often deferring to well-established and more vocal players when calling a foul or deciding on extra time. Now imagine the likelihood of missed calls and dubious judgments when that very vocal player just happens to represent the head referee’s favourite team and you will understand why we are where we are. Derek SteelbergPrinceton, New Jersey The “idea of widespread ‘two-tier policing’ that systematically discriminates against whites in Britain is a nonsense”, you say, “White and black people are equally likely to be victims of crime. And black people are more than twice as likely to be arrested than their white counterparts” (“Was this Britain’s George Floyd moment?”, June 6th). That doesn’t support your point. Being a victim of crime and committing one are different things, so equal victimisation tells you nothing about who offends, and therefore nothing about whether arrests are disproportionate to offending. The relevant measure would be perpetration by ethnicity. If you don’t have that data it would be better to write nothing at all than to draw a conclusion from the wrong figure. Peter MüllerBerlin
I read with interest your leader on the evolution of war and technology (“Smarter tech is making war a dumber choice”, May 30th). We seem to be fulfilling the predictions of science fiction and any Trekkie worth his or her salt would have conjured up a classic episode from “Star Trek” nearly 60 years ago for the ultimate depiction of how war evolves. “A Taste of Armageddon” imagined a conflict with computer-simulated attacks and counter-attacks. But there was no damage at all to infrastructure as no actual missiles were fired. Instead citizens of the warring countries willingly submitted to be destroyed in death chambers in order to fulfil the computers’ simulated casualty count. This was done to avoid mutual destruction and preserve civilisation in a war lasting 500 years. We’re lacking only our own Captain Kirk and Mr Spock to save us from these simulations, which killed millions citizens who the computer ruled were “casualties” in the episode and were marched to their very real deaths. Some things never change. GREGG VISINEAUEl Cerrito, California “The imperial vision of Abiy Ahmed” (May 30th) correctly assessed the political and diplomatic failure of Ethiopia’s once-promising prime minister. Ethiopia is now deeply fragmented and edging towards state failure. Conflict has made large parts of the country inaccessible and Mr Abiy’s erratic