Finance & Development articles from December 2007

Finance & Development archives from December 2007

A tune-up or an overhaul?(managing global health and economy)(Editorial)
December 1, 2007... ARE FRAIN often heard in international circles is that global problems--HIV/AIDS, trade disputes, climate change, financial contagion, and many others--require global solutions. Is today s global governance system up to the job? After all, the...

Female power.(LETTERS TO THE EDITOR)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... I agree with Mayra Buvinic and Elizabeth King's "Smart Economics" (June 2007) that much more should be done to promote the economic power of women. Given the significance women bring to all their endeavors, they are the driving force in...

A moral obligation.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... "Making Remittances Work for Africa" (by Sanjeev Gupta, Catherine Pattillo, and Smita Wagh, June 2007) caught my attention, not because I live in the third world and still less because of my nationality, but because it objectively describes a...

Make it a partnership of equals.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... While I greatly enjoyed Harry Broadman's "Connecting Africa and Asia" (June 2007), the author is missing an important point. Trade between the two continents is profitable provided African countries export commodities to Asia as inputs for...

Chinese on the move.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... Ulrich Jacoby's "Getting Together" (June 2007) clearly sets out the basis for the partnership between China and Africa. But in describing the interdependence between the two economies, the author seems to have overlooked the issue of Chinese...

The cost of tied aid.(LETTERS TO THE EDITOR)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... On reading "Getting Together," I had a strong sense of having seen it all before. Turnkey projects have a long history of failure in Africa. Worse, Chinese aid is apparently strongly tied to Chinese companies and Chinese products (70 percent of...

Unlocking hidden treasures.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... Bob Traa and Alina Carare's "A Government's Net Worth" (June 2007) provides a timely discussion of hidden worth--and hidden problems--in public finance. India's ministry of finance has been meticulously compiling a list of public assets and...

Accounting for the environment.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... The article "A Government's Net Worth" led me to draw some conclusions regarding developing countries (particularly Argentina) and how they deal with the problem of replenishing environmental goods. The Argentine government's net worth has...

Chart it.(International Monetary Fund uses Data Mapper)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... IMF Data Mapper, a new interactive data visualization tool, allows web visitors to select and compare key data across countries, groups, and regions. At the click of a mouse, Data Mapper displays selected data from the IMF's World Economic...

Fast is best.(organic foods traded by air can harm environment)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Banning air-freighted organic farm products on environmental grounds might impoverish vulnerable populations, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) warned. The UN agency said proposals by some Northern Hemisphere ecological groups...

Events in 2007/2008.(conferences of organizations)(Brief article)(Calendar)
December 1, 2007... December 4-20, 2007, Paris, France International Conference of NGOs, UNESCO December 3-14, 2007, Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia United Nations Climate Change Conference January 23-27, 2008, Davos, Switzerland World Economic Forum Annual...

Continental connections.(information technology services industry provides services for broadband)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... All of Africa's capitals and major cities will be interconnected by broadband information technology (IT) links by 2012 if agreements reached at a recent IT summit meeting are fulfilled. The UN International Telecommunications Union and the...

Attractive Africa.(attracting foreign direct investment)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Foreign direct investment flows to Africa's raw materials industries surged in 2006, the UN Conference on Trade and Development reported. The agency's annual World Investment Report said the investment went mainly to the continent's off and gas...

Burn and earn.(sawdust used as an alternate power resource)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A project to convert wood industry waste in Costa Rica into a profitable, environmentfriendly energy source may offer new ways for industries in developing countries to help combat global warming. The UN Food and...

Harnessing ideas to idealism: Arvind Subramanian profiles.(PEOPLE IN ECONOMICS)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IDEAS in economics can sometimes prompt policies that promote the greater good. But ideas motivated by idealism and then pursued with intense commitment are rare. Yet these are the qualities that make Michael Kremer,...

Global governance: new players, new rules: why the 20th-century model needs a makeover.(Cover story)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN the summer of 2007, millions of homeowners in the United States discovered that the terms on their mortgage loans had worsened at the same time that the market values of their homes were declining. The squeeze...

Subprime: tentacles of a crisis: the mortgage market turbulence is as much about the breakdown of the structure of U.S. financial markets as it is about bad debt.
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HOW could a modest increase in seriously delinquent subprime mortgages, which amounted to an additional $34 billion in troubled loans, so disrupt the $57 trillion U.S. financial system last summer that worldwide...

Changing aid landscape.(PICTURE THIS)
December 1, 2007... DESPITE donors' commitments to scale up aid in line with the 2002 Monterrey Consensus and the 2005 Gleneagles Declaration, the response has been mixed. Official development assistance (ODA) declined by roughly 5 percent in real terms in...

Governing global trade: the multilateral system that has underpinned world trade for over 50 years is facing serious challenges.
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WITH the Doha Round negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) proving to be drawn out and difficult, WTO ministerial conferences plagued by discord inside negotiating rooms and violent protests outside, and...

Financial crises of the future: will they resemble the contagious crises of the 1990s or the country-specific crises of the 1890s?
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE damaging financial crises of the 1990s--originating in Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997, and Russia in 1998--spread quickly across emerging markets, prompting calls for reform of the financial architecture. That was...

Governing global health: how better coordination can advance global health and improve value for money.
December 1, 2007... HEALTH problems have never respected borders. Leprosy spread from Asia to Europe in the 4th century B.C., thanks most likely to the army of Alexander the Great. The Black Death originated in Central Asia and subsequently ripped through Europe...

Is the global health system broken? Three points of view on how the global health system can be improved.(POINT OF VIEW)
December 1, 2007... In September 2000, the global community committed with great fanfare to meet a set of eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015--three of which center on health: reducing child mortality by two-thirds; reducing maternal mortality by...

Backcasting Latin America: looking back at the business cycle in one of the most volatile regions requires reconstructing GDP data.
December 1, 2007... LATIN America is traditionally seen as economically volatile. Yet there has been relatively little work on the evolution of business cycles in the region and on how their main features compare with those of other countries and regions. That is...

Africa's missing ingredients: how aid can be better directed to entrench development in sub-Saharan Africa.
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BY SOME accounts, Africa is finally on a growth path. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing its fourth year of strong growth and is forecast to do well next year too. Higher oil revenues, strong commodity prices, and...

Helping the poor.(The Persistence of Poverty Why the Economics of the Well-off Can't Help the Poor)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Charles Karellis The Persistence of Poverty Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, 208 pp., $30 (cloth). Even rich societies have many poor...

Explaining sustainomics.(Sustainomics Framework and Practical Applications)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mohan Munasinghe Making Development More Sustainable Sustainomics Framework and Practical Applications MIND Press, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2007, 650 pp., $40 (paper). Having adopted the sustainable development label,...

Greenspan unplugged.(Alan Greenspan)(Occupation overview)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Alan Greenspan The Age of Turbulence Adventures in a New World Penguin Group, 2007, 531 pp., $35 (cloth). At an event promoting his new book, Alan Greenspan was asked how it felt to no longer be chairman of the...

Africa explained.(overall economy of Sub-Saharan Africa)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] African Development Making Sense of the Issues and Actors Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., Boulder, Colorado, 2007, 250 pp., $22 (paper). Sub-Saharan Africa's early post-independence years were hopeful, and an...

China rising.(growth in economy and trade)
December 1, 2007... Will Hutton The Writing on the Wall Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy Simon & Schuster Trade, New York, 2006, 432 pp., $28 (cloth). China's radical transformation from a moribund centrally , planned country to...

The (food) price of success: higher global demand for calories brings inflationary pressure and more.(STRAIGHT TALK)
December 1, 2007... AUSTRALIAN wheat, Chinese pork, U.S. corn. What do these three specific goods have to do with macroeconomics? Unfortunately, right now, a great deal, and in ways that are globally interconnected. Over the past 12 months, the world has...

United Arab Emirates.(COUNTRY FOCUS)(economic growth in United Arab Emirates)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... In recent years, the U.A.E. has enjoyed rapid economic growth-impressive by any global standard. Its challenge now is to address the housing constraint that is pushing up inflation while sustaining growth and ensuring macroeconomic and...