debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The UNDP claims ‘the Rise of the South’ is having a significant impact on economic growth and societal change. In a notable challenge to the gloom of recession in the West and all the continuing and, indeed scarcely unjustified, talk of continuing crisis, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently published its 2013 Human Development Report (HDR) [...]
At its best, the G8 can provide the coordinated action that helps the poorest countries to catch up. Historically, the main focus of such action was on aid, but the fiscal context is now profoundly different. While G8 governments have no spare money, many poor countries have the prospects of serious money from recent natural [...]
The world used to be divided into the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’. During the past decade the concept of the developing world has been successfully challenged: the countries that used to be so described have now been disaggregated. Countries such as China and India have diverged quite fundamentally from those like Chad and Afghanistan. Viewed [...]
Watch political philosopher Thomas Pogge set out his plan to end global poverty at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London. Philosopher Thomas Pogge: A Global Plan to End Poverty from The RSA on FORA.tv
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos has lost some of its pre-crisis panache. After all, before the meltdown in 2008, the captains of finance and industry could trumpet the virtues of globalization, technology, and financial liberalization, which supposedly heralded a new era of relentless growth. The benefits would be shared by all, if [...]
The lives of the world’s poorest people have improved more rapidly in the last 15 years than ever before, yet I am optimistic that we will do even better in the next 15 years. After all, human knowledge is increasing. We can see this concretely in the development and declining costs of new medicines like [...]
Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist and SEJ columnist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor.
In the shadow of the euro crisis and America’s fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economy’s long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril. The most serious is global warming. While the global economy’s weak performance has led to a [...]
For the first time since the demise of the Eastern Bloc Cuba’s socialist rulers are undertaking serious reform. However, the leadership lacks courage and trust in the people. In Cuba, some things work differently. The visit to the island by Pope Benedict XVI at the end of March 2012 brought this home once again. The [...]
In March Kenya discovered oil. Even before it has proved to be commercial, and years before the money will flow, oil has already had an impact: by April public servants were demanding a large wage increase. Oil discoveries are psychological earthquakes: people imagine that good times have arrived. Such a narrative is the default option for [...]
During the nineteenth century London grew from a city of one million people to six million, a rate of expansion commensurate with the rapid urbanization currently underway in Africa. Further, per capita income in London in the mid-nineteenth century was roughly comparable with that in Africa today. But unlike modern Africa, nineteenth century London and [...]
US President Barack Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim for the presidency of the World Bank has been well received – and rightly so, especially given some of the other names that were bandied about. In Kim, a public-health professor who is now President of Dartmouth University and previously led the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS [...]
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