In The News

Inequality Breeds Resistance to Globalization

Pranab Bardhan November 27, 2012
Many critics point to globalization, its swirling influences over worldwide connections through trade, technology and communications, as a culprit behind growing inequality. Yet Pranab Bardhan, economist with the University of California, Berkeley, points out that the connections deliver both opportunities and challenges. Multiple forces contribute to entrenched economic inequality in so many...

Reelected Obama Looks at Fiscal Cliff

David Dapice November 7, 2012
President Barack Obama has won the hard fought battle for a second term. But he has no time to rest or celebrate. The president and US politicians must hurry to put finances in order, warns economist David Dapice. Congress failing to agree on raising taxes or cut spending invoked a deus ex machina of painful automatic cuts and deadlines. In summer of 2011, the US Congress came close to...

Europe, Not Euro, May Break Apart

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller November 2, 2012
Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders and other regions in Europe mull breaking away from their respective nation-states, but that doesn’t necessarily signal an insular outlook. Instead, Scotland is opening offices in Washington and Brussels, nurturing ties and exploring dissociating from British inclinations to exit the European Union. Cultural traditions became low priority during an era of empires,...

US Lags in Race for Tech Talent

Vivek Wadhwa October 26, 2012
The US is highly protectionist on labor and jobs. The country remains a top destination among skilled talent because of its opportunities in education, angel investors and markets. But regulations on visas that allow immigrants to work at US firms increasingly lead to bottlenecks in the application process and career obstacles for individuals in a highly mobile global market for top talent. US...

China Rebalancing Won’t Doom Region

Deepak Gopinath October 24, 2012
China aims to be more than an assembly line. The government is actively rebalancing its economy to exit industries dependent on raw materials and labor, and that provides great opportunity for China’s neighbors in two ways, explains Deepak Gopinath, global markets director for Trusted Sources, an emerging-markets consulting firm. Neighboring economies can pick up the slack in low-value industries...

Mongolia in Globalization’s Chokehold

Mark Juergensmeyer October 19, 2012
Landlocked Mongolia is in the heart of Asia, a land of great mineral resources and of rapid change since it abandoned communism in 1990 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Mark Juergensmeyer, director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, visited shortly after that transition and more recently – ascribes many changes to the...

Amid US Outsourcing Fears, India’s IT Firms Thrive

Patrick Thibodeau October 17, 2012
In his presidential campaigns, both 2008 and now, Barack Obama has blasted outsourcing and offshoring of US jobs. Such political attention unnerved India’s IT industry, which relies on skilled labor and large numbers of temporary work visas, particularly the H-1B for the US. That visa allows educated foreign workers with US employer sponsors to stay about six years and work in select technical...