Shares in strongman leaders seem to be falling. The market has not yet turned bearish, but autocrats have little reason to feel bullish.Consider China. The internal power games of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are notoriously opaque, and rarely does political infighting reach the level at which it cannot be covered up. And yet rumbles of disquiet can clearly be heard.
Asia’s future is inextricably tied to the Himalayas, the world’s tallest mountain range and the source of the water-stressed continent’s major river systems.
It is becoming increasingly clear that globalization progresses not steadily, but through ups and downs. Currently, it appears to be in a downswing, hindered by a growing number of irresponsible political leaders who describe it as the root of all evil.
For most of the world’s poor and vulnerable people, secure property rights, including land tenure, are a rarely accessible luxury. Unless this changes, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be impossible to achieve.Land tenure determines who can use land, for how long, and under what conditions. Tenure arrangements may be based both on official laws and policies, and on informal customs.
While much of the world’s attention is focused on the economic damage being wrought by United States (US) President Donald Trump’s trade wars, global trade’s twin – foreign direct investment (FDI) – has largely been neglected.
With newspapers full of stories about the challenges migrant families face, it might be tempting to assume that the causes of displacement are also being addressed. In most cases, however, such an assumption would be wrong. Today, solutions to forced migration focus almost exclusively on aiding refugees after they flee, rather than targeting the reasons for their flight.
One of the more ambitious targets of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the commitment to end preventable deaths of newborns and children over the next decade. If this target is met, by 2030 no country will have a neonatal mortality rate above 12 deaths per 1,000 births – a quarter of the current rate in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.Given the magnitude of the challenge, huge investments will be needed in health-care infrastructure and planning.
Politics has a nasty habit of surprising us – especially in a country like China, where there is little transparency and a lot of intrigue. Five months ago, President Xi Jinping jolted his countrymen by abolishing the presidential term limit and signalling his intention to serve for life.
United States (US) President Donald Trump’s inability to think strategically is undermining longstanding relationships, upending the global order, and accelerating the decline of his country’s global influence – or so the increasingly popular wisdom goes. But this assessment is not nearly as obvious as its proponents – especially political adversaries and critics in the mainstream US media – claim.America’s relative decline was a hot topic long before Trump took office.
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.
