Despite media hoopla, cross-border crime -- illegal drugs sales, evasion of taxes, intellectual property theft, and money laundering -- is hardly a new phenomenon. For much of history, moreover, the United States was as much perpetrator as victim. Recognizing this awkward truth should help cool down overheated debates about today's transnational problems and how to respond to them.

Inequality is rising across the post-industrial capitalist world. The problem is not caused by politics and politics will never be able to eliminate it. But simply ignoring it could generate a populist backlash. Governments must accept that today as ever, inequality and insecurity are the inevitable results of market operations. Their challenge is to find ways of shielding citizens from capitalism's adverse consequences -- even as they preserve the dynamism that produces capitalism's vast economic and cultural benefits in the first place.

Even as Mexico continues to struggle with grave security threats, its steady rise is transforming the country's economy, society, and political system. Given the Mexico's bright future and the interests it shares with the United States in energy, manufacturing, and security, Washington needs to start seeing its southern neighbor as a partner instead of a problem.

FDR Treasury official Harry Dexter White was the leading architect of the Bretton Woods international monetary and financial system. But he was also a vital agent for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s and '40s. This article brings to bear startling new archival evidence to illuminate his motives.

While the grim effects of the 2008 financial crisis still resonate across the globe, the recession wasn't all bad: it triggered fundamental economic restructuring, and the result is a U.S. economy poised to emerge stronger than it was before.

From the demise of the gold standard in the 1970s to the battle over financial reform today, Paul Volcker has helped shape U.S. economic policy for decades.

Over the past several years, the most talked-about trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of the rest, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers.

Andrea Campbell tips her hand partway through her essay "America the Undertaxed" (September/October 2012) when she writes that "the central debate in U.S. politics is whether to keep taxes, particularly federal taxes, at their current levels in the long term or emulate other advanced nations and raise them."

The euro's naysayers have it all wrong.

Germany seems like Europe's lone island of fiscal stability, but trouble lurks under its impressive export-fueled growth.

Compared with other developed countries, the United States has very low taxes, little income redistribution, and an extraordinarily complex tax code.

According to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail, economic development hinges on a country's political institutions.

Since weak demand is at the heart of the recession, governments need to enact not just structural reforms but also stimulus programs, argues Menzie Chinn.

If the eurozone splinters, it will have been an avoidable disaster.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive multilateral trade agreement now in the works that focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, could add billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and solidify Washington's commitment to the Pacific. But if the Obama administration fails to calm critics of the deal, there is a growing possibility that it could collapse.

Tough economic times are often met in Washington with calls for retrenchment. But for decades, write two former top Pentagon officials, long-term forward deployments of U.S. forces and robust alliances have guaranteed stability and uninterrupted trade, the very conditions the United States needs for economic prosperity. The Obama administration gets it.

Unlike other economic powerhouses, the United States does little to help its own companies win business abroad, and that timidity has allowed China to devour market share in emerging economies. It is time for Washington to shed its hang-ups about lobbying on behalf of American firms and start taking commercial diplomacy seriously.

As the global financial sector has swelled, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown. Three new books -- by James Galbraith, Robert Shiller, and Charles Ferguson -- come down differently on how much banks are to blame for inequality and what the government should do about it.

Brazil's rise never depended on the sale of commodities, and thanks to recent reforms, the country will continue to prosper, write Shannon O'Neil, Richard Lapper, and Larry Rohter. Ronaldo Lemos, meanwhile, claims that those reforms have not gone far enough.

As Europe emerges from economic crisis, a larger challenge remains: finally turning the eurozone into an optimal currency area, with economies similar enough to sustain a single monetary policy.