In The News

Nepal's Constitutional Crisis Involves Giant Neighbors

Harsh V. Pant October 15, 2015
Nepal is undergoing a transition, putting forth a constitution after a decade of conflict, political upheavals and protests along with a devastating earthquake from which it has yet to recover. But the constitution, described as discriminating against ethnic groups that account for almost half the population, could pose more challenges. The country of 28 million people is nestled between two...

Angus Deaton’s Nobel Is a Victory for Globalization – And Raises Hard Questions About It

Tim Fernholz October 13, 2015
Economies are built on people’s choices, and the Nobel for economic sciences, the Sverges Riksbank Prize, has been awarded to Angus Deaton for his research in that area. “In a world where we increasingly measure welfare based on what we can consume, Deaton has given policymakers important tools to boost prosperity, particularly in poor countries, while arguing – sometimes controversially – that...

Us Against Them? Why Globalization Doesn't Have to Pit American Workers Against the World's Poor

Jeff Spross October 9, 2015
Global poverty is in decline. The percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty is 14 percent, dropping by half since the early 1990s. Yet wages have stagnated in advanced economies like the United States. “The paradox is that both trends have probably been pushed along by the same forces: globalization and international trade,” reports Jeff Spross for the Week. Many workers in...

Stuffing Data Gaps With Dollars: What Will It Cost to Close the Data Deficit in Poor Countries?

Laurence Chandy and Christine Zhang September 18, 2015
Data collections, as simple as population counts, contribute to good planning on services that benefit a nation’s development, health and prosperity. Yet such collections are lacking in low-income countries. The International Monetary Fund has set standards on data dissemination and 66 countries don’t meet those standards for population surveys, more than 70 lack living standard surveys and 39...

“The Last Mile”: Laying the Political and Security Foundations First for Peace, Then Development

Bruce Jones August 5, 2015
Poverty, while declining worldwide, is increasingly concentrated in regions fraught with violence and instability. Roughly half of the world’s poor live in fragile states. The international community encourages peace agreements, focusing less on the long-term stability needed for economic development. The Central African Republic is an example, facing cyclical violence and lack of economic...

Are Foreign NGOs Rebuilding Haiti or Cashing In?

Nathalie Baptiste August 3, 2015
Since the 2010 earthquake, billions of dollars in aid have poured into Haiti. But most of this money has gone towards salaries for expatriate NGO workers, not towards rebuilding Haiti. The trend has created a class of well-compensated expats who take jobs that might have gone to Haitians and drives up the island’s cost of living, suggests Nathalie Baptiste for Foreign Policy. Projects like...

Climate Change Brings Moral Change

Mary Evelyn Tucker July 14, 2015
The world’s major religions urge both respect for nature’s power and gratitude for Earth’s bounty. No one should have been surprised by the encyclical of Pope Francis, rallying believers and non-believers in a global call: “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that...