In The News

Japan's Neglected Resource: Female Workers

Howard W. French July 25, 2003
Inequality in Japan's workplace is not only keeping Japanese women down, but also Japan itself. With population decline threatening huge labor shortages and possible economic collapse, it would seem Japan might be eager to tap into an underutilized segment of the population. Indeed, many experts maintain that expanding the role of women in the workplace could be the best stimulus for Japan...

We Didn't Start the Fire: Capitalism and Its Critics, Then and Now

Sheri Berman July 24, 2003
It seems that the recent era of globalization is what’s fueling a controversy over the merits of capitalism, but historian Jerry Muller’s book, “The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought,” reminds us that capitalism has had its critics since at least the 18th century. Capitalism is a relatively new system in the trajectory of human history, says this review essay. However,...

What the Millennium Development Compact Means

Romeo Austria Reyes July 23, 2003
Although slow progress in aid, trade, and debt relief casts doubt on the feasibility of the Millennium Development Goals and the sincerity of rich nations to the Millennium Development Compact, Indonesia is generally making good progress toward realizing the development objectives. However, inter-provincial inequalities are plentiful. To ensure the good national trend is matched at the sub-...

IBM Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas

Steven Greenhouse July 22, 2003
The conventional wisdom on globalization in the US has held that unskilled jobs will gradually shift overseas, leaving American workers free to perform higher-paid, white-collar jobs. But now that IBM is considering moving millions of white-collar jobs to countries like India and China, politicians and technology workers are crying foul. Corporations like IBM argue that moving service jobs...

Don't Trust Technocrats

Joseph Stiglitz July 16, 2003
When developing countries fail to institute economic reforms recommended by expert technocrats, they are usually dismissed as populist and unenlightened, and will suffer consequences. But the fact of the matter is, says economist Joseph Stiglitz, many technocratic suggestions are not very appropriate given the specifics of developing countries. Economic policies are not neutral but political, and...

Workers Falling Behind in Mexico

Mary Jordan July 15, 2003
In Mexico, there are too many workers and too few jobs. The country has failed to recover from the financial crisis of the 1990s that sent the peso and the average standard of living plummeting. And, while the number of unskilled laborers remains high – indeed higher than ever before as women increasingly enter the workforce – lower wages in countries like Indonesia and Guatemala have lured...

Your Farm Subsidies Are Strangling Us

Amadou Toumani Toure July 11, 2003
African cotton is the best and cheapest in the world, maintain Presidents Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali and Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso. Yet cotton farmers in their countries remain impoverished. In a jointly written opinion article for The New York Times, the Presidents of these two African nations solicit Western nations to cut the cotton farm subsidies that lead to overproduction, distort...