Country of the year: the live debate

Speakers

• Patrick Foulis

  Foreign editor

  Patrick Foulis is The Economist‘s foreign editor, responsible for its coverage globally outside of Britain and the United States. He was previously business affairs editor, running the economics, business, finance and science coverage between 2018 and 2022. He has also been New York bureau chief, US business editor and written the Schumpeter column. Before that he set up a new editorial bureau in Mumbai where he was based for four years as our India business and finance editor. Prior to that he was banking editor. Patrick joined The Economist in 2008. He is the author of special reports on the world economy, and on business in Asia and in emerging markets. He and four colleagues won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2012 for coverage of the eurozone crisis. Before joining Patrick worked at the Financial Times, where he was deputy editor of the Lex Column, and as a sell-side analyst in London, mainly on UBS Warburg’s number-one ranked European telecoms team. Patrick graduated with a double first class degree in social and political sciences from Cambridge University and was born and brought up in Scotland.
• Sophie Pedder

  Paris bureau chief

  Sophie Pedder covers French politics and economics. She joined The Economist in 1990 and has reported on Britain, European politics, the media industry, and the end of apartheid in South Africa as the Johannesburg correspondent in the 1990s. Earlier, she was a research assistant for William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago’s Urban Poverty and Family Life project. She is the author of “Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation” (Bloomsbury, 2018), and “Le déni français” (JC Lattès, 2012). A graduate of Oxford University and the University of Chicago, she won the David Watt journalism prize in 2006.
• David Rennie

  Geopolitics editor

  David Rennie writes The Telegram column on geopolitics and co-hosts the Drum Tower podcast on China. Since he joined The Economist in 2007, he has worked as a columnist in Brussels, London, Washington and Beijing, where he was bureau chief from 2018 to 2024. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a contributing editor of the Spectator magazine and a reporter for the Evening Standard. He has won several awards, most recently the 2023 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia, shared with his Drum Tower co-host, Sue-Lin Wong.