In The News

When developing countries fail to institute economic reforms recommended by expert technocrats, they are usually dismissed as populist and unenlightened, and will suffer consequences. But the fact of the matter is, says economist Joseph Stiglitz, many technocratic suggestions are not very appropriate given the specifics of developing countries. Economic policies are not neutral but political, and...

In Mexico, there are too many workers and too few jobs. The country has failed to recover from the financial crisis of the 1990s that sent the peso and the average standard of living plummeting. And, while the number of unskilled laborers remains high – indeed higher than ever before as women increasingly enter the workforce – lower wages in countries like Indonesia and Guatemala have lured...

African cotton is the best and cheapest in the world, maintain Presidents Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali and Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso. Yet cotton farmers in their countries remain impoverished. In a jointly written opinion article for The New York Times, the Presidents of these two African nations solicit Western nations to cut the cotton farm subsidies that lead to overproduction, distort...