In The News

Global Anti-GM Sentiment Slows China's Biotech Agenda

Valerie Karplus September 26, 2003
Genetic modification of agricultural products like cotton, rice, and tomatoes has recently allowed small farmers in China to avoid spraying toxic pesticides on their crops. Pesticides – laborious to apply and proven to be harmful to your health – are now becoming obsolete because genetically modified (GM) crops are automatically resistant to the most common agricultural threats. But despite early...

Globalization: Preserving the Benefits

Anne. O. Krueger September 25, 2003
Facing mounting criticism around the world, proponents of globalization have risen to its defense. IMF First Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger argues for a renewed commitment to the principles of free trade that have fueled the last half-century’s ever-increasing economic expansion. Though she accepts the frequently valid misgivings of globalization’s critics, Krueger claims that its...

Can Rich Countries Stem the Outflow of Jobs?

Eddie Lee September 23, 2003
Last month, the United States lost 93,000 jobs, many of them in the service sector. This commentary in Singapore's Straits Times attributes this job loss to outsourcing by developed world companies. In an effort to cut costs, many companies are hiring workers in developing countries since they are willing to work for far less than their counterparts in the US and Singapore. As the...

No Good Reason to Dance

Ernesto Zedillo September 22, 2003
In the latest round of WTO talks, the chasm between 'developed' and 'developing' nations over agricultural subsidies proved too large to cross in only one week. The Cancun meeting has thus been largely declared a failure. Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and former president of Mexico, says that this difficulty should be taken as a...

Bold Action Can Still Save Doha Round

Clyde Prestowitz September 19, 2003
With the collapse of the WTO trade talks last week, things do not bode well for the Doha Round – planned specifically to help developing countries – or for the global trading system in general. Former Reagan administration trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz says, however, that in one simple unilateral move the US could earn enormous global goodwill and save the floundering world trading system....

Our War With France

Thomas L. Friedman September 18, 2003
"France is not just our annoying ally," asserts Thomas Friedman in this opinion piece for The New York Times. "France is becoming our enemy." By advocating a hasty transfer of power to a symbolic Iraqi sovereignty, France seems bent on US failure in Iraq. If the French government truly wished to see the US succeed in Iraq, Friedman argues, it would use its influence in the...

China Joins the Global Economy - Part Two

Deborah Davis September 17, 2003
In part one of this 2-part series, David Zweig explained the processes by which China joined the global economy. In part two, China scholar Deborah Davis discusses the prospects for China's continued economic growth. While incomes have improved and everyone's boat has risen, Davis says, so has the country's once-low income inequality. Increased differences in wealth, as well as...