In The News

The Stay-At-Home Vacation

Hannah Karp January 28, 2008
With the public increasingly aware about the dangers of global warming, some consumers swear off travel. For most Americans, annual commuting to work produces more carbon emissions than limited air travel. But air travel is rapid and relatively inexpensive, and a passenger’s share of carbon emitted during a couple of long-distance flights quickly exceeds the typical annual commute by car. So...

Stern Report Attacked for “Advocacy”

Adam Morton January 26, 2008
In analyzing any issue, economists must work to control bias. Researchers with the Productivity Commission in Australia have labeled the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change “as much an exercise in advocacy as an economic analysis.” The researchers agree with the Stern Review that climate change will have economic consequences, but suggest that the likelihood of catastrophic events,...

Careful What You Wish For

January 22, 2008
Many challenges await the next US president, and all demand immediate fixes, report a team of reporters for Newsweek. Candidates make promises about 12 million illegal immigrants, with 500,000 more entering every year; a strained health care system that is unaffordable for the millions of uninsured; an overextended military in Iraq and Afghanistan; record oil prices; a battered economy; global...

Globalization and the Markets – Part I

David Dapice January 22, 2008
Stock-market indexes have tumbled like dominos around the globe, exposing vulnerability of intricate economic connections. A crisis in one nation – and the panic – can quickly bounce from one country to the next. A major cause behind the stock-market plunges the world over are US financial instruments designed to spread and protect risk by including all manner of home mortgages, explains...

China's Celebrities “Buy” Extra Children

Tania Branigan January 22, 2008
China, the most populous nation in the world, has a strict policy limiting families to one child. But growing numbers of wealthy Chinese bypass rules by paying the penalties. The penalty in the capital city is estimated at five times the average Beijing salary, a sum inconsequential for the rich and devastating for the poor. Bitterness over inequality has emerged in a country that remains...

Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow

Sharon LaFraniere January 15, 2008
Huge industrial trawlers, most from Europe, push through waters off the African coast, efficiently scraping sea beds clean of fish. Such nonselective industrial fishing has devastated fish populations and habitat, destroying a livelihood and encouraging more African fishermen to use their boats to assist fellow Africans in fleeing their homelands for work in Europe. Governments throughout Africa...

World Food Stocks Dwindling Rapidly, UN Warns

Elisabeth Rosenthal January 10, 2008
Extreme weather events, a growing population, increasing affluence adding more meat to diets and diversion of grain crops for subsidized biofuels have led to depleted food reserves and soaring prices reserves. High oil prices add to the complications of transferring food aid to the most vulnerable developing nations. Wealthy nations can compensate by reducing tariffs and importing more grain,...