At the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos last month, the evidence of mounting threats to nature, and of nature’s contributions to people, featured higher on the agenda than ever before.
Throughout my life, I have seen the power of education. I have witnessed how quality education for all can support the creation of dynamic economies and help to sustain peace, prosperity, and stability.
Europe is sleepwalking into oblivion, and the people of Europe need to wake up before it is too late. If they don’t, the European Union (EU) will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991.
One of the pillars of nuclear-arms control became history on 2 February, with the expiry of the 60-day deadline that the United States (US) had given Russia to save the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Russia blithely let the deadline pass. But so did the European Union (EU), abetted by Germany.
On 19 November, Carlos Ghosn, the board chair and former CEO of Nissan, was arrested at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on suspicion of under-reporting income and misusing corporate funds for personal purposes; he remains in custody.
In his influential 1954 article “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” the future Nobel laureate economist Arthur Lewis concluded that “the central problem in the theory of economic development is to understand the process by which a community which was previously saving and investing four or five percent of its national income or less, converts itself into an economy where voluntary saving is running at about 12 or 15 percent of its national income or more.” That process,
When United States (US) President Donald Trump meets again with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un next month, he will be staging the second act in a comedy of manners that now passes for US foreign policy on the Korean Peninsula. Between Kim’s billets-doux to the White House and Trump’s gushing praise of Kim, the script could have been written by Oscar Wilde.
There is not a country in the world that is not grappling with the serious health and environmental consequences of their people’s diets. There has to be a better way to feed everyone well and sustainably.As it stands, roughly 820 million people worldwide lack sufficient food, and many more – often in the same countries – consume unhealthy foods that lead to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-limiting conditions.
At the current rate of progress, it will take more than 200 years to achieve gender equality and female empowerment at work. In many countries, girls are still forced to marry young, which limits their access to education and future employment opportunities. In Niger, for example, in 2016, 76 percent of girls aged 15-19 were married, which partly explains why 73 percent of lower-secondary-school-age girls are out of school.
Jim Yong Kim’s sudden resignation as president of the World Bank Group (WBG) offers an opportunity to reflect on the direction, legitimacy, and effectiveness of that 75-year old institution. Like other multilateral institutions, the Bank in recent years has been criticised for its elitism and for championing outmoded models of economic globalisation that have failed to deliver broad-based benefits.
Chinese leaders do like their slogans, and where foreign policy is concerned, two have reflected Beijing’s thinking in recent times. The first is the cautious principle of tao guang yang hui, usually rendered in English as “hide your light and bide your time,” which guided Chinese policy for decades after Deng Xiaoping established it in the 1980s.
The remote, coral-fringed North Sentinel Island made headlines late last year, after an American Christian missionary’s covert expedition to convert its residents – the world’s last known pre-Neolithic tribal group – ended in his death.
