In The News

Climate-Change Challenge for the Poor – Part I

Chandrashekhar Dasgupta September 26, 2007
Although climate change has been brought about largely by development in industrialized rich nations, it will impose the most hardship on the poorest countries. In the first article of this two-part series, Ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta of India argues that accelerated social and economic development may offer the only hope for poor nations who have a long way to go in adapting to climate...

Biofuelling the Food Crisis

John Vidal September 10, 2007
The notion of an automobile powered by fuel produced from plants appeals to any nation worried about dependence on foreign oil or declining oil reserves. A biofuel boom presents ostensibly environmentally-friendly implications, yet leads some analysts to predict a food crisis for the world’s most vulnerable populations. Plants for fuel will inevitably compete with food-plants, prompting rising...

India's Lower Castes Seek Social Progress in Global Job Market

Emily Wax September 5, 2007
For 3000 years, India operated with a caste system; from birth, Indians understood their status and role in society. Prohibited by law, the caste system remains a source for discrimination in India. By law, the public sector and public universities set aside a percentage of jobs for people born into the lowest castes, and activists encourage similar affirmative-action programs within the private...

India’s Third Liberation

John Elkington September 4, 2007
India has experienced liberation, first winning independence from the UK in 1947 while also enduring partition with the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and then loosening state control of the economy in the 1990s to accept reform, privatization and globalization. But great poverty still lingers in the nation, calling for a third stage of liberation, suggests John Elkington writing for...

The Tale of Globalization’s Exiles

Richard Lapper August 30, 2007
Media and government reports focus on hedge funds and other mechanisms of finance that move money around the globe. But individuals also shift funds, including small amounts sent in envelopes or by wire, from immigrant workers in wealthy nations to poor relatives back home. For some poor nations, the total of such remittances outweigh foreign aid or revenues earned from leading agricultural...

Like Wages for Chocolate

Humphrey Hawksley August 21, 2007
Exploited by capitalists of the West, some farmers of Africa may eventually be tempted by the Chinese communist model or even worse, radical Islam as their ideology, says Humphrey Hawksley, a BBC correspondent and the author of “The History Book,” as he presents a case study of cocoa production in African countries. With stagnant prices of cocoa in international commodity markets, the real...

In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence

Nicholas Wade August 16, 2007
The Industrial Revolution may have been the result of an evolutionary change in human nature, argues Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis. His research shows that, generation after generation, the wealthy people of England had more surviving children than the poor, leading him to theorize that the behaviors that made for wealth – or the middle-class values...