The Economist Latin America November 16, 2019

Politics Unrest flared again in Hong Kong after a protester died. Another was shot at close range by a police officer, allegedly while trying to grab his gun. A man was set on fire by demonstrators after remonstrating with them. One senior officer said society was on the “brink of a total breakdown”. The Chinese government said Hong Kong was “sliding into the abyss of terrorism”. China’s president, Xi Jinping, paid a visit to Greece, an important partner in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to improve global infrastructure. The two countries said they would work to “overcome any obstacles” facing a Chinese state-owned company’s plan to upgrade the port of Piraeus. Mr Xi promised support for Greece’s campaign to secure the return of the Elgin marbles from Britain. India’s Supreme…

AMERICA HAS seen some spectacular investment booms: think of the railways in the 1860s, Detroit’s car industry in the 1940s or the fracking frenzy in this century. Today the latest bonanza is in full swing, but instead of steel and sand it involves scripts, sounds, screens and celebrities. This week Disney launched a streaming service which offers “Star Wars” and other hits from its vast catalogue for $6.99 a month, less than the cost of a DVD. As the business model pioneered by Netflix is copied by dozens of rivals, over 700m subscribers are now streaming video across the planet. Roughly as much cash—over $100bn this year—is being invested in content as it is in America’s oil industry. In total the entertainment business has spent at least $650bn on acquisitions…

Politics Unrest flared again in Hong Kong after a protester died. Another was shot at close range by a police officer, allegedly while trying to grab his gun. A man was set on fire by demonstrators after remonstrating with them. One senior officer said society was on the “brink of a total breakdown”. The Chinese government said Hong Kong was “sliding into the abyss of terrorism”. China’s president, Xi Jinping, paid a visit to Greece, an important partner in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to improve global infrastructure. The two countries said they would work to “overcome any obstacles” facing a Chinese state-owned company’s plan to upgrade the port of Piraeus. Mr Xi promised support for Greece’s campaign to secure the return of the Elgin marbles from…

THERE ARE few more emotive words in Latin America than “coup”, and for good reason. From 1930 to the 1970s, the region suffered the frequent overthrow of civilian governments in often bloody military putsches. The victims were usually of the left. In 1954 a moderate reforming government in Guatemala was ousted in the name of anti-communism by the CIA. Other coups followed, including that of General Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende, a radical socialist, in Chile in 1973. Since the democratisation of the region in the 1980s, coups have been rare. But the very idea has become a potent propaganda tool, especially for leftists. Scarcely a week goes by without Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s fraudulently elected dictator, claiming that he is threatened by one. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua says the same. Dilma…

MANY WORKERS in the private sector no longer have them. But most public-sector employees in America are still entitled to a valuable benefit: a pension linked to their final salary. A long-standing problem is that states and cities, which fund their plans differently from the federal government, have been lax about putting aside enough money to cover these promises. The resulting black hole is becoming ever more alarming (see Finance section). Although the American stockmarket has been hitting record highs, the average public-sector pension fund has a bigger deficit in percentage terms than it did in either 2000, or the start of this decade. In some states and cities schemes are less than 50% funded; Illinois has six of the worst. The cost of pension promises has risen because people are living…

IMAGINE YOU are offered a job at triple your salary. But first you must pass through a locked door, and someone with the key won’t open it. You might be willing to pay them to let you through. Whether this is fair or not is beside the point. They have the key and you don’t. If you gave them a portion of the increase in your wages, you would both be better off. This is not a bad analogy for global immigration policy. When migrants move from a poor country to a rich one, they typically make three to six times as much money as before (see our Special report in this issue). If everyone who wanted to migrate were allowed to do so, the world would by one estimate be…