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...

The Tsunami Report Card

Karl F. Indefurth December 21, 2005
On December 26, 2004, an earthquake of staggering proportions unleashed ocean waves that crashed ashore in Asia and East Africa, killing 225,000 people and displacing 1.7 million more. Quickly, world governments, international organizations and a multitude of non-profits pledged support. Many predicted that unless this effort proved successful, a "second tsunami" of widespread disease...

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...

India Gains Credibility as an Emergent Export Titan

Jo Johnson December 1, 2005
For years, analysts dismissed the prospects of India's manufacturing sector. India had been left behind by the wave of manufacturing off-sourcing that enriched China and Southeast Asia, and critics argued that India's best hope of catching up with its neighbors lay in the service sector. Those critics are falling silent, however, as 1990s economic reforms finally begin to spur...

Sugar Powers a Revolution on Brazil’s Roads

Tom Phillips November 23, 2005
Brazil has found an alternative to oil that it is touting as the future of fuel. “Alcohol,” a bio-ethanol fuel made from sugar cane, is increasingly powering Brazilian automobiles, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva speaks of an “energy revolution,” led by his country. Biodiesel, a renewable fuel, is seen as a way to make Brazil,and indeed the world, less dependent on oil. Its manufacture...

Remittances Are Effective Weapon Against Poverty

Norman Lamont November 18, 2005
In a report this week, the World Bank drew attention to the money flow from immigrants back to their countries of origin. The amount of money transferred annually is between two and three times the level of development aid from rich to poor countries. According to the bank, the economic benefits of remittances could outstrip even the benefits of trade liberalization. Yet many governments now...

America’s Future is Stuck Overseas

Stuart Anderson November 16, 2005
The numbers are better, but not good. Since hitting a low in 2002, post September 11, the number of foreign graduate students enrolled in the United States has been improving, albeit slowly. The importance of these international students to American technological and economic superiority cannot be understated, as former US immigration official Stuart Anderson writes. Foreign graduates...