In The News

Will Services Provide Our Salvation?

Hamish McRae February 18, 2009
Some industries center on necessities and conventional wisdom might suggest that those companies might be less devastated by economic crisis. Even as auto manufacturers lay off workers, companies like Domino’s Pizza hire extra employees. Unfortunately, many of the new service jobs pay less than the old manufacturing positions, explains Hamish McRae in a column for the Independent, adding there is...

For Russia's Migrants, Economic Despair Douses Flickers of Hope

Michael Schwirtz February 16, 2009
Russia has the second largest immigrant population the world, after the US, once inviting workers from former Soviet republics to construct luxury hotels, office buildings and homes amid a decade-long oil boom. A drop in world oil prices hit the emerging economy of Russia, striking its migrant workers particularly hard. Employers withhold wages, and the government sets quotas on jobs for...

The Reverse Swing

Nayan Chanda February 16, 2009
Migration is a major force of globalization: Workers on the move seek opportunity and alleviate poverty in the process of dispersing and collecting new ideas. A harsh global economic recession has reduced opportunities for foreign and domestic labor alike, stirred protectionist instincts and prompted reverse migration around the globe. The most immediate impact, explains YaleGlobal editor Nayan...

Union in Crisis

Jonathan Fenby February 16, 2009
Europeans shrugged about a credit crisis in 2008, chalking it up to a lavish American lifestyle, dependent on debt, and assumed they were immune. But national economies are tightly connected, particularly those of the European Union, and crisis spread quickly. Compounding the financial crisis is seething anger over closed factories, long unemployment lines, banks that lost rather than protected...

Statistics Chief Karen Dunnell Inflames Row Over Foreign Workers

Sam Coates February 12, 2009
Foreign workers make up less than 10 percent of the UK employment base. Rather than accept responsibility for a bleak job outlook and problematic financial policies, politicians lambasted release of a statistic that exposes disappearing jobs for citizens in the midst of a campaign on “British jobs for British workers.” UK ministers were chagrined, notes a team of reporters for the Times in...

US Recession: Spend Now, Save Later

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller February 11, 2009
To fend off an economic disaster, governments around the globe, from China to the US, lower interest rates, increase the money supply, enact stimulus packages and urge their citizens to shop to save jobs and fix the economy. All eyes are on the US, the worlds' biggest economy, where personal consumption makes up 70 percent of the gross national product. But US citizens are not buying into...

Quiet Revolution: Can Globalization Help Women Out of Traditional Roles?

Barbara Supp February 11, 2009
Television, internet and travelers send new ideas around the globe and that includes changing roles for women in business and government. As more females become the “face of power,” this also changes business and government traditions, explains Barbara Supp in an article for Spiegel Online. Globalization and the new ideas it delivers often runs”up against archaic social ideas that cement...