In The News

Globalization Isn't Killing GM

Jim Jubak December 1, 2005
In recent years, large job layoffs and short-term cost cutting have become a commonplace in many American corporations. The managers of these businesses defend these changes as necessary in the face of globalization and competition from lower-cost operators abroad. But as business journalist Jim Jubak writes, budget cuts made in the name of improving global competitiveness are doing nothing to...

Give Us Your Skilled Masses

Gary S. Becker December 1, 2005
Amid the Bush Administration's efforts to create a guest-worker program for undocumented immigrants, Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker argues that the US must do more to welcome skilled legal immigrants too. The US currently offers only 140,000 green cards each year, preventing many valuable scientists and engineers from gaining permanent residency. Instead, they are made to stay in the...

Sugar Powers a Revolution on Brazil’s Roads

Tom Phillips November 23, 2005
Brazil has found an alternative to oil that it is touting as the future of fuel. “Alcohol,” a bio-ethanol fuel made from sugar cane, is increasingly powering Brazilian automobiles, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva speaks of an “energy revolution,” led by his country. Biodiesel, a renewable fuel, is seen as a way to make Brazil,and indeed the world, less dependent on oil. Its manufacture...

Remittances Are Effective Weapon Against Poverty

Norman Lamont November 18, 2005
In a report this week, the World Bank drew attention to the money flow from immigrants back to their countries of origin. The amount of money transferred annually is between two and three times the level of development aid from rich to poor countries. According to the bank, the economic benefits of remittances could outstrip even the benefits of trade liberalization. Yet many governments now...

Greenspan Says Globalization Driving U.S. Current Account Gap

Craig Torres November 14, 2005
The US current account deficit has skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an unprecedented 6.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan attempted to explain the widening of that gap yesterday, arguing that the gap reflects “a pronounced new phase of globalization.” Globalization, says Greenspan, has weakened “home bias”—the tendency to invest in one’s...

The Global Sweep to Mop Up the World's Oil Resources

November 14, 2005
China is scouring the globe for energy with which to fuel its economic boom. It has found much of that energy in Africa. Dangling promises of aid and development in exchange for access to oil, Beijing has forged partnerships with a growing number of countries south of the Sahara. The Chinese are not uneasy about dealing with African regimes considered too corrupt or too brutal by the West....

Wholesalers’ Hub to Overhaul Image

Kwanchai Rungfapaisarn November 9, 2005
When Chinese corporations made moves earlier this year to buy up American companies, critics in the U.S. prophesized the imminent end of Western dominance under the weight of a rising China. While such descriptions of China as a global superpower seem premature, the Asian giant already reigns supreme in its own backyard. The revamping of Pratunam Centre, Thailand’s largest wholesale center, is a...