2025-09-04
24 分钟The Economist Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm your host, Rosie Bloor.
Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
There's an area in Washington DC that was once called Swampoodle.
Doesn't sound too appealing, does it?
But since developers built a metro station, new housing, and renamed it NOMA,
it's become one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in America.
And ghosts, spirits and fortune-telling are part of daily life in Hong Kong.
But who are the experts who guide people's views on them?
And what happens when they start to have discernible effects on key industries?
First up though.
So the sounds you hear are the hustle and bustle of the passport office in central Baghdad.
Gareth Brown is a Middle East correspondent.
I visited the passport office because It's a small institution,
but it's also representative of a wider bureaucratic change that has been happening in Iraq in the last three or four years.
Once this process would take many months,
but due to the digitalisation of the process and a general streamlining of bureaucracy,
you can now get a new passport in about 45 minutes here.
The officials working here say they think it's the fastest passport renewal service in the world.
The digitisation is something simple but it has an enormous impact.