It’s official: There are now 100 countries that offer Taiwanese citizens visa-free travel. Malaysia has the honor of hitting the century mark—following closely behind Australia and Montenegro, which announced their decisions last week. An EU visa waiver for Taiwan went into effect this past January. The U.S. has still not made it across the finish line. The Obama Administration is lumbering behind, weighted down by bureaucracy, a sclerotic and out-of-date Taiwan policy, and inattention. Taiwan is now under the 3 percent visa refusal rate—an ill-conceived requirement to begin with, but …
International graduate students are cooling on the United States a new study released this week by the The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) shows. Offers of admission from U.S. graduate schools to prospective international students decreased 3% from 2008 to 2009, the first decline since 2004. More than half of responding institutions reported a decrease in international offers of admission, a decline that is founded on a major drop of 16 percent declines in offers to students from both India and South Korea. (Overall numbers would have been even lower …
In 1979, Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler wrote a book called “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls,” detailing 4,000 years of disastrous attempts by government to control market prices. Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee will vote on adding a 41st century to that litany of failure. The target: credit card “interchange fees.” Interchange fees are the fees paid by one bank to another, and passed on to merchants, as the price for processing a credit card purchase. They are set by credit card associations, such as MasterCard and Visa …
