No Member of Parliament or party candidate will say it, but one of the main reasons why the National Assembly MPs made such a strong push for the Prado Quota is in part to recover their election expenses. The Election Commission of Bhutan (ECB) does provide Nu 150,000 per candidate …

In 2023 when there was no money in the treasury due to the poor state of the economy, the government gave a 50 percent pay hike for MPs, civil servants and public servants which would cost Nu 6 bn a year. This was money Bhutan did not have and the …

A large batch of Bhutanese families are leaving this year as part of the Diversity Visa recipients of the USA. One such family had a civil servant husband and a wife with a job in the private sector, their own house and they had no real economic motives to move …

The victory of President Donald Trump offers important lessons for all countries across the world, including Bhutan, and it is thus important to understand why he won, especially since USA is the sole superpower on the global stage. The victory of Trump is a clear backlash to unrestrained globalization since …

By Gernot Wagner NEW YORK – Elections are supposed to clarify policy uncertainties, and on the economic front, Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris has done just that. All three major US stock indices and US Treasury yields jumped the morning after Election Day, reflecting expectations of both strong economic growth and …

The new upcoming Thimphu Design Code as a part of the new Thimphu Structure Plan is an important change and rights many wrongs with urban development. In the past few decades, even for all the planning, Thimphu had a rapid and chaotic growth and this is visible when one drives …

By John Mark Hansen CHICAGO – I teach a course at the University of Chicago on presidential elections, and I hear the same kind of question from friends on both the right and the left. The Republicans I grew up with in western Kansas cannot understand why Donald Trump is …

In between the clean wage hike of 2022 and the actual pay hike of 2023 public servants got a hike of 55 to 76 percent. This hike further widened the already existing pay gaps between the government sector and the private sector. The private sector was always small and weak …