In The News

Thomson Reuters Foundation: Corporations Tackle Forced Labor

Adela Suliman September 14, 2017
The EcoVadis Global Corporate Social Responsibility Risk and Performance Index evaluated corporate social responsibility efforts of more than 20,000 companies and found that human trafficking and forced labor are common in global industries where minimal skills are required, reports Adela Suliman for Thomson Reuters Foundation. The good news is that companies are pursuing transparency and audits...

The Guardian: Charities to Pick Up Bill for Sweeping Aid Cuts?

Kate Hodal September 14, 2017
Governments that reduce taxes and cut programs cannot expect charitable giving to replace funding for an array of health, education or foreign aid programs. The most vulnerable will suffer, with disease, conflict, pollution, illiteracy and poverty posing cross-border consequences. Charitable giving may have created an incentive for governments to pursue budget cuts in every area, then replacing...

The Globe and Mail: China Used Research Mission to Test Trade Route Through Canada’s Northwest Passage

Robert Fife and Steven Chase September 13, 2017
China used a research icebreaker, the Snow Dragon, to check if Chinese cargo ships could rely on Canada’s Northwest Passage rather than the Panama Canal, reducing delivery time by 20 percent. The report came from Xinhau News Agency, which “also reported that China sent six merchant ships through Russia's Northeast Passage this summer as the world's second-largest economy hopes to take...

New Statesman: A World Without Animals

Simon Barnes September 8, 2017
Biodiversity is under threat. The Red Data Book of the International Union for Conservation of Nature suggests that one third of wild-animal species are in danger; the Living Planet Index from the World Wildlife Foundation and the Zoological Society of London predicts that numbers of wild animals could decline by two-thirds before 2020. Writing for New Statesman, Simon Barnes reminds that a sixth...

Harvard Business Review: Prepare for Climate Change

Matthew E. Kahn, Brian Casey and Nolan Jones September 7, 2017
Flooding, wildfires and other risks associated with climate change are on the rise, and “and yet behavioral economics research argues that we are collectively underinvesting in protecting ourselves,” write Matthew E. Kahn, Brian Casey and Nolan Jones for Harvard Business Review. Reasons include a tendency to focus on short time frames, optimism on risk exposure and lack of preparation. The...

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs: The Case for Open Markets

Dany Bahar September 6, 2017
In the aftermath of Brexit and Donald J. Trump’s presidential ascension, a world that embraced globalization and free trade is turning its back on economic and political principles established after the Second World War. Dany Bahar, writing for the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, prefaces his advocacy for more global trade by arguing that protectionism – a policy championed by Trump to revive the...

The Economist: Weather-Related Disasters Are Increasing

September 5, 2017
Texas, India and Niger confront record flooding, and in Houston, the fourth largest US city, nearly 50 inches of rain fell after Hurricane Harvey landed. According to the United Nations’s disaster-monitoring system, the United States “sits alongside China and India in suffering the greatest number of natural disasters globally between 1995 and 2015. These include earthquakes, storms, floods and...