In The News

Wal-Mart in Global Online Push

Jonathan Birchall February 6, 2008
For some companies, the goal is cornering the market. Wal-Mart has announced intentions to offset slowing growth in the world’s leading consumer nation, the US, by promoting internet sales and delivery of groceries and other items throughout Asia and Latin America. For now, Wal-Mart is second only to Amazon, which began selling books online and then expanded to electronics and other products....

Jobs for the Children of Globalization

Tim Weber January 29, 2008
Today’s children, the future workforce for the world, will confront intense competition in a world where workers are mobile, projects can be shipped instantly over the internet and customers everywhere demand bargain prices. Advising children to pursue an education is no longer adequate. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, a session on career advice for children was overbooked; attendees...

Virus On Jet Plane

Nayan Chanda January 22, 2008
The speed and frequency of today’s travel has placed individuals at risk to the spread of many infectious diseases. As Nayan Chanda points out, governments facing these challenges should be more vigilant than ever to avoid future epidemics. Full cooperation with the WHO must also be achieved. In an interconnected world, it is important everyone recognizes that our health and well-being is...

Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie

Jennifer 8. Lee January 18, 2008
Fortune cookies are popular in Chinese restaurants the world over, everywhere but China. Japanese researcher Yasuko Nakamachi theorizes the absence is because the cookies originated in Japan, as evidenced by references in Japanese literature and art decades before the early 1900s. California restaurants with Japanese owners introduced the dessert between 1907 and 1914, reports author Jennifer Lee...

Southeast Asian Democratization in the Era of Globalization

Roy Voragen January 16, 2008
Anticipating the consequences of globalization is one way of adapting to the rapid change. Increasingly, individuals acquire wealth not so much through hard work or innovation than by predicting globalization’s intricate twisting paths. Cities and citizens in the developed nations, while they complain about globalization, are better prepared for adapting to the effects than citizens in developing...

Stop the World (and Avoid Reality)

Alan S. Blinder January 14, 2008
The US was long the most open and competitive economy in the world. But candidates for US president, both Democrats and Republicans, respond to voters’ desire for a time out from international engagement, a mood labeled “Stop the World Syndrome,” by economist Alan Blinder in an opinion essay for the New York Times. The attitude stems from frustration over the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as...

Can the Midwest Regain Its Economic Clout?

Richard C. Longworth January 9, 2008
Achieving economic stability requires a strategy that does not neglect global markets or trends. In the US, the Midwest region has been devastated by companies shifting manufacturing operations first to southern states, paralyzing debt among farmers, followed by globalization with its shift of factories and jobs to low-wage countries. “Of course, an economic revolution as disruptive as...