I agree with others that I don't understand where you're coming from in some sort of decline or big change in The Economist. Maybe if you're overly obsessed with the editorials, which I've always skipped, something has changed. But the basic news reporting remains more or less the same as it has been for the 5+ years I've been subscribing.

I subscribed to Le Monde Diplomatique for a year and rarely found more than 1 or 2 articles a month that were interesting info I couldn't get elsewhere.

I subscribe to Foreign Affairs and find it to be 80% boring junk on the same set of topics about the rise of China, what to do about Russia, etc. The occasional article or book review on a less covered country makes it sort of worth the subscription price to me.

If you're just looking for something like "interesting book reviews," I'd take a look at the Literary Review. Or maybe the Times Literary Supplement. And New York Review of Books and London Review of Books offer much more in-depth reviews, but reading between the lines it seems like the op is saying The Economist is too liberal for them and is not going to like the tenor of most of what's in these.