Editor's Note: Throughout the week, Ruchir Sharma will be posting thought-provoking questions with answers and explanations on CNN.com/GPS.  Be sure to check out his excellent new book Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.

By Ruchir Sharma - Special to CNN

Question: There are 15 members in the club of trillion-dollar economies. What are the next two countries that will join the club?

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Editor’s Note: Dr Maha Hosain Aziz is a Professor of Politics (adjunct) in the MA Program at New York University, a Senior Analyst at geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat and an Asia Insight Columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek.

By Maha Hosain Aziz - Special to CNN

If you were a politician in 2011 in South Asia, there’s a good chance you might very well have been slapped. In both Nepal and India, a citizen so frustrated by political inertia physically lashed out at his local politician. If you were leader of a country with high youth unemployment in the Middle East or Western Europe, there’s no question you faced waves of anti-government protest. Even in Russia - usually immune to challenges to the state - you experienced some form of public discontent over the status quo.

In fact, on every continent last year, in major, middle and small states, citizens expressed bursts of frustration against their governments. Such sentiment has continued in 2012; recurrent protests indicate citizens’ lack of confidence in their political leaders and their conviction that there must be a better, more legitimate way to govern. FULL POST

Sunday on GPS, I interviewed Ruchir Sharma, author of the terrific new book Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.  The following is a web-extra portion of our interview where Sharma lays out three reasons he's still confident in America's growth. Here's the transcript:

Fareed Zakaria: You don't deal with America, but you're also saying that in this new landscape, you're pretty comfortable with the United States?

Ruchir Sharma: Yes. I think that the U.S., as I talk about here, has three things going for it.

One, I think, is the exchange rate, that a dollar today, when adjusted for all inflation against its trade-weighted partners, is the most competitive that it's ever been in history. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. For more from Slaughter, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anne-Marie Slaughter.

By Anne-Marie Slaughter, Project Syndicate

The conventional wisdom last week on whether Syria would comply with former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s ceasefire plan was that it was up to Russia. We were reverting to Cold War politics, in which the West was unwilling to use force and Russia was willing to keep arming and supporting its client. Thus, Russia held the trump card: the choice of how much pressure it was willing to put on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to comply with the plan.

If this view were correct, Iran would surely be holding an equally powerful hand. Annan, after all, traveled to Tehran as well. Traditional balance-of-power geopolitics, it seems, is alive and well.

But this is, at best, a partial view that obscures as much as it reveals. In particular, it misses the crucial and growing importance of regional politics and institutions. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University.  For more from Skidelsky, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter.

By Robert Skidelsky, Project Syndicate

Nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, many are wondering why economic recovery is taking so long. Indeed, its sluggishness has confounded even the experts. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world economy should have grown by 4.4% in 2011, and should grow by 4.5% in 2012. In fact, the latest figures from the World Bank indicate that growth reached just 2.7% in 2011, and will slow this year to 2.5% – a figure that may well need to be revised downwards.

There are two possible reasons for the discrepancy between forecast and outcome. Either the damage caused by the financial crisis was more serious than people realized, or the economic medicine prescribed was less efficacious than policymakers believed. FULL POST

Editor’s Note: Dr. Maha Hosain Aziz is a Professor of Politics (adjunct) in the Master’s Program at New York University, a Senior Analyst at geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat and an Asia Insight Columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek.

By Maha Hosain Aziz – Special to CNN

Occupy Wall Street has been about more than just corporate greed and income inequality. Occupy protesters around the globe may not realize it but, at various points in the past six months, many have been fighting for the same cause as the peasant communities of rural Vietnam during the 1930s - the moral economy.

Theorists have typically used moral economy rhetoric to explain rural movements where protesters felt their basic right to subsistence was being threatened. In the case of Vietnam, the onset of colonial capitalism in the Great Depression contributed to a food crisis for peasant farmers, prompting significant protests. In effect, an informal contract had been broken between the governing power and the governed involving the individual’s basic right to feed himself.

Today, a similar “contract” has been broken between governing powers and the governed.

Since its global launch in October 2011, the Occupy movement has effectively evolved to challenge governments for depriving citizens of their basic right to subsistence in the Great Recession (or its aftermath) - to work, afford basic goods, or in some cases keep their homes. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Tune in Sunday at 10a.m. or 1p.m. ET for Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN.

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

It has now been four years since the start of the global financial crisis. This was a crisis that showcased a breakdown of markets - too much leverage, too little concern about risks and too much debt. So you'd imagine that any political backlash would involve a move towards the left.

Well, that's not what happened.

Instead, we saw a shift towards the political right in much of the industrialized world. Here in America, the Tea Party was born, pulling conservatives further towards the right. Consider that in the 2008 election, Mitt Romney was considered the conservative challenger to John McCain. In this election he is the moderate, outflanked on the right by every other candidate.

This dynamic seems afoot in Europe as well. Britain's Conservatives returned to power after 13 years. Germany's Merkel and France's Sarkozy cemented their positions. Spain has a new conservative government.

What happened to the left? Why was there no great surge in left-wing populism? FULL POST

Editor's Note: Micah Zenko is a fellow for conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he blogs. You can also follow him on Twitter. The following is reprinted with the permission of CFR.org.

By Micah Zenko, CFR.org

On February 15, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee: “I can’t impress upon you that in my personal military judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.” Two weeks later, during a House Budget Committee hearing, when asked to expand upon his earlier statement, he replied:

“There are a wide variety of nonstate actors, super-empowered individuals, terrorist groups, who have acquired capabilities that heretofore were the monopoly of nation states. And so when I said that it’s the most dangerous period in my military career, thirty-eight years, I really meant it. I wake up every morning waiting for that cyber attack or waiting for that terrorist attack or waiting for that nuclear proliferation, waiting for that proliferation of technologies that makes it an increasingly competitive security environment around the globe.”

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Last week I wrote in op-ed in the Yale Daily News in support of Yale's new college at the National University of Singapore.  There has been strong disagreement among members of the Yale community over whether Yale should open a campus in Singapore, which has limits on freedom that we in the West strongly disagree with. Here's a portion of my response:

"Singapore is not a liberal democracy, though it is not so different from many Western democracies at earlier stages of development. It is not the caricature one sometimes reads about. Singapore is open to the world, embraces free markets and is routinely ranked as one of the least corrupt countries in the world.

"It has also become more open over the last ten years. In fact, it is to enhance and enrich this process that Singapore has invited Yale to help create a liberal arts college. There will be differences in perspectives among students and faculty, foreigners and locals, but that makes it an ideal place to engage with issues of democracy and liberalism. I can imagine a fascinating seminar on democracy that would be much feistier in Singapore than at Yale precisely because there will be those who take positions quite critical of what is received wisdom in the West. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Dr. James M. Lindsay is a Senior Vice President at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Visit his blog here and follow him on Twitter.

By James M. Lindsay, CFR.org

Growing income inequality in the United States has attracted a lot of comment. But figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that greater income inequality is not a U.S.-only phenomenon. Income inequality is up across rich countries.

Economists use something called the Gini coefficient to measure inequality. It is a scale that runs from zero to one, with zero indicating total equality (everyone makes the same amount) and one indicating total inequality (that is, one person gets all the income and everyone else gets nothing). As the chart above shows, the Gini coefficient rose over the last quarter century in seventeen OECD countries.

What may be most remarkable about the numbers is that income inequality was up not just in traditionally higher income-inequality countries such as Mexico, the United States, and Israel, but also in traditionally lower income-inequality countries such as Germany, Finland, and Sweden.

The fact that income inequality is up almost across the board might seem to suggest that globalization and technology are to blame rather than the specific tax, spending, and regulatory choices that individual countries make. After all, globalization and technology are universal in their impact while countries follow very different national economic policies.

The OECD’s economists, however, say that the jury is still out on the causes of greater income inequality. Which brings to mind something I read once to the effect that if you lay all the world’s economists end to end you will never reach a conclusion. So let the argument continue.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of James M. Lindsay.