Over the past two decades, China has been achieving rapid technological progress, thanks in no small part to its massive investment in research and development, which totaled some 2.2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) last year. Yet China is nowhere near the technological frontier.

This week, South Africa is hosting the tenth annual gathering of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). When the first BRIC summit was held in 2009 (South Africa was added in 2010), the world was in the throes of a financial crisis of the developed world’s making, and the increasingly dynamic BRIC bloc represented the future.

The decision to start a family is one of the most important choices a person can make. It is also a fundamental human right; only individual adults should have the power to decide whether, when, or how often to conceive. And yet, for millions of people around the world, this right remains unrealized.More than 200 million women in developing countries who want to delay or avoid pregnancy are not using modern contraception.

No one yet knows what deals United States (US) President Donald Trump may have struck with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their private two-hour meeting in Helsinki. But it is already clear that Trump’s self-congratulations for striking a deal to “denuclearise” the Korean Peninsula during his Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un are ringing hollow.

Since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, too many policymakers have fallen for the oil and gas industry’s rhetoric about how it can help to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

In 1984, I gathered the most successful musicians of the time to form a “supergroup” called Band Aid to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. The next year, an even larger grouping was formed for Live Aid, a major benefit concert and music-based fundraising initiative that continues to this day.

No matter how much chaos and disruption United States (US) President Donald Trump causes – to trade, business, and even America’s core alliances – his supporters regularly insist that Trump is a leader who gets things done.

The contrast between the disarray in the West, on open display at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit and at last month’s Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Canada, and China’s mounting international self-confidence is growing clearer by the day. Last month, the Communist Party of China (CPC) concluded its Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, the second since Xi Jinping became China’s undisputed ruler in 2012. These meetings are not everyday affairs.

Populist electoral victories around the world in recent years have led many to conclude that liberal democracy is under assault.

In the last few years, for many people and their leaders, globalisation has become a scourge to be purged in favour of greater protectionism and unilateralism. This represents a sharp departure from the recent past, when globalisation was widely regarded as a positive force. What changed, and why?Key components of globalisation include greater cross-border mobility of goods, labour, and capital, each of which promises significant overall benefits for economies.