In The News

Politicus: U.S. Model for Europe: Immigrant Work Ethic

John Vinocur December 14, 2005
As the recent riots in France show, Europe faces a conundrum when it comes to integrating its immigrant populations into their host societies. Some acknowledged and indisputably real factors need to be addressed, including discrimination and lack of education. However, a new notion is garnering attention from some European politicians – the idea that the US has had more success integrating...

Trade Rounds a Harder Sell

Guy de Jonquières December 13, 2005
As ministers from all around the world gather in Hong Kong to inaugurate the latest WTO trade round, Financial Times columnist Guy de Jonquiéres sees signs of trouble. The meeting has a relatively modest agenda and is being primarily promoted as focusing on development and poverty. But given that the WTO's raison d'etre is liberalization and the creation of opportunities, not aid or the...

The WTO Can Promote Both Free Trade and Human Rights

Susan Ariel Aaronson December 13, 2005
As protesters flock to the WTO meeting in Hong Kong along with finance ministers and business leaders, many observers, including Susan Ariel Aaronson and Jamie M. Zimmerman, agree with their claims that the WTO should be seeking relevance beyond just trade liberalization. But a wider focus – on human rights, development and labor – need not require any shift away from the WTO's central...

Globalisation's Strange Bedfellows

Alison Maitland December 12, 2005
In an unusual move, Unilever, the global consumer goods giant, has partnered with Oxfam to study its impact on local populations and businesses in Indonesia, with a view to showing that globalization is not necessarily a bad thing for developing countries. Oxfam was allowed unprecedented access to Unilever's Indonesian workers, and also looked at the impact of its consumer sales in that...

Open Letter to the French Minister of the Interior

Edouard Glissant December 9, 2005
This "Open letter" to French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy comes at a time of global scrutiny for France, and from the pen of two leading Martinican authors, Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau (Winner of the French Prix Goncourt for literature in 1997). The duo, well-respected writers and new-wave philosophers of the African diaspora, take Sarkozy and the French Republic to...

Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to Chinese

David Barboza December 9, 2005
Online gamers with money to burn, who have neither the time nor patience to battle their way up to the higher levels of games such as World of Warcraft and Magic Land, are willing to pay others to do it for them. A business known as "gold farming" has appeared in China, in which young men, mostly with dim employment prospects, spend hours playing online games, accumulating points,...

The Rise of Nearshoring

December 6, 2005
While India and China are popular destinations for outsourcing, a new trend - “nearshoring” global business concerns to formerly Communist Eastern Europe is emerging. The premise is to move production, research and business to countries that may not be quite as cheap as India or China, but are still cheap and also much closer to home. Western concerns are finding multi-lingual workers and a...