In The News

Multinational Corporations: A Key to Global Poverty Reduction – Part II

George C. Lodge January 5, 2006
To combat a growing image problem, multinational corporations must capitalize on their enormous potential for reducing poverty. MNCs can and do change the very conditions that create poverty, yet lack presence in the world’s poorest countries. More recently, NGO leaders and development institutions have come to acknowledge that their own activism in the struggle against global poverty requires...

Multinational Corporations: A Key to Global Poverty Reduction – Part I

George C. Lodge January 2, 2006
The legitimacy of multinational corporations has been increasingly questioned in recent years. In this two-part series, Harvard professor George C. Lodge and International Finance Corporation economist Craig Wilson argue that multinational corporations (MNCs) have contributed enormously to reducing global poverty. MNCs exist to provide value for their shareholders, but are also in a position...

Vietnam Goes Global

Jordan Ryan December 15, 2005
Although Vietnam had hoped to join the WTO before that body’s December ministerial meeting, an accession deal is not likely to finalized before mid-2006. Still, Vietnam’s eagerness to join the global trading system marks a noteworthy ideological shift for the ruling Communist Party, writes Jordan Ryan, the United Nations Development Program Representative in Hanoi. Vietnam’s Communist leaders...

Globalisation's Strange Bedfellows

Alison Maitland December 12, 2005
In an unusual move, Unilever, the global consumer goods giant, has partnered with Oxfam to study its impact on local populations and businesses in Indonesia, with a view to showing that globalization is not necessarily a bad thing for developing countries. Oxfam was allowed unprecedented access to Unilever's Indonesian workers, and also looked at the impact of its consumer sales in that...

Globalization Isn't Killing GM

Jim Jubak December 1, 2005
In recent years, large job layoffs and short-term cost cutting have become a commonplace in many American corporations. The managers of these businesses defend these changes as necessary in the face of globalization and competition from lower-cost operators abroad. But as business journalist Jim Jubak writes, budget cuts made in the name of improving global competitiveness are doing nothing to...

Corporate Europe Ignores Diversity at its Peril

Marta Dassu November 30, 2005
The logic of obtaining the best possible candidates for a position seems to fall flat in the European corporate world, according to a recent study by European researchers. At the top of the business world, talent and qualifications may take a back seat to nationalistic hiring and promotion policies. In a survey of 450 different companies in the EU’s five biggest economies, the researchers found...

Americans are Tuning Out the World

Alkman Granitsas November 24, 2005
As the world becomes accustomed to the American way of life, Americans are tuning out the rest of the world. US citizens have paid less and less attention to foreign affairs since the 1970s, writes journalist Alkman Granitsas. The number of university students studying foreign languages has declined, and fewer Americans travel overseas than their counterparts in other developed countries. News...