Finance & Development articles from March 1 2008

Finance & Development archives from March 1 2008

Pricey commodities.(FROM THE EDITOR)(Editorial)
March 1, 2008... WITH prices for oil, nickel, tin, corn, and wheat hitting record highs in recent months--building on dramatic increases since their lows of 2000--it s time to ask just how long this boom will last and how economies will fare. Certainly,...

The SARS story.(LETTERS TO THE EDITOR)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... Congratulations on a first-rate global governance issue (December 2007). In "Governing Global Health," David Bloom highlights the experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and reports how "concerted action... quickly brought it...

Failed "scheme".(LETTERS TO THE EDITOR)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... The question posed to Joe Cerrell, Helene Gayle and J. Stephen Morrison, and Tore Godal, "Is the Global Health System Broken?" (December 2007), assumes that a "system" exists. At best, the current global health delivery efforts can be labeled a...

Lax regulation in subprime crisis.(LETTERS TO THE EDITOR)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... Thank you for your excellent and clear explanation of the subprime mortgage problem ("Subprime: Tentacles of a Crisis," December 2007). It sorted out many questions I had. However, there were some matters related to this crisis that I wish...

Oil trade and the WTO.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... Uri Dadush and Julia Nielson's "Governing Global Trade" (December 2007) provides a valuable account of most of the key issues facing the multilateral trading system. However, I find it disappointing that the authors failed to discuss the...

Measuring risks.
March 1, 2008... Establishing a sound debt strategy can help immunize a country against sudden, adverse market changes and financial turmoil. To help analyze the soundness of a country's public debt management, the IMF has developed tools that can be used by...

Year of the coral reef.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Coral reef experts and supporters have designated 2008 the International Year of the Reef, calling for greater efforts to combat climate change to protect the world's biologically complex ocean ecosystem. Scientists...

Mangrove management.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The world has lost about 3.6 million hectares of mangroves since 1980, equivalent to an alarming 20 percent loss of the total mangrove area, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) recent mangrove assessment study. Asia...

War games.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Some 250,000 children worldwide are being recruited to fight in armed conflicts in violation of international law, the UN said in its latest report on children and armed conflict, which covers October 2006 to August...

Record foreign investment.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... In 2007, global foreign direct investment (FDI) reached a new high of $1.5 trillion, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported. The UN agency attributed the record high to the growth of transnational corporations and strong...

Events in 2008.(Calendar)
March 1, 2008... May 17-19, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008 May 18-19, Kiev, Ukraine 2008 Annual Meeting of the EBRD June 3-4, Paris, France Climate Change, Prosperity and Stability/OECD June 5,...

The quest for rules: Prakash Loungani interviews John Taylor.(PEOPLE IN ECONOMICS)(Interview)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HAVING a concept named after you is as much a mark of honor in economics as it is in other sciences. By this standard, Stanford's John Taylor is among the most honored macroeconomists of his generation. Indeed,...

Riding a wave: soaring commodity prices may have a lasting impact.(COMMODITIES BOOM)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] COMMODITY markets have been booming. Prices of many commodities--especially those of oil, nickel, tin, corn, and wheat--have reached record highs in recent months despite credit market turbulence and slowing...

Global energy: increasingly unsustainable.(PICTURE THIS)
March 1, 2008... THE global energy system is on an increasingly unsustainable path. China and India are transforming the global energy system by their sheer size, and energy prices are set to remain high, according to the International Energy Agency's (IEA)...

Climate change and the economy: policies to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases need not hobble the economy.
March 1, 2008... ADDRESSING climate change and the economic damage it will likely bring presents policymakers with a dilemma. The benefits of policy action are uncertain and would accrue largely to future generations, whereas the costs of policies run the risk...

Global warming and agriculture: if steps are not taken to curb carbon emissions, agriculture productivity could fall dramatically, especially in developing countries.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] JOHN STEINBECK'S The Grapes of Wrath provides a verbal mural depicting America's experience in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with its migration of "Okies" from ruined farmlands in Oklahoma and Texas to a...

Paying for climate change: governments must manage the incentives for households and firms to counter and adapt to climate change.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CLIMATE science tells that the earth is warming as a result of human activities. But considerable uncertainty regarding the precise nature and extent of the risks remains. Economists are needed to develop sensible...

The greening of markets: financial markets can play a valuable role in addressing climate change.
March 1, 2008... IT IS not immediately obvious what role financial markets can play in addressing climate change. Climate change happens slowly and has a global impact on the physical environment, whereas financial markets react to news in fractions of a second...

Rising temperatures, rising risks: making development more sustainable will help address climate change.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] GLOBAL warming is already taking its toll. In Darfur, where several hundred thousand people have died in recent years from the internal conflict, climate change has exacerbated water and land shortages (because of...

Exchange rate regimes: fix or float?(BACK TO BASICS)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WHETHER he knows it or not, the owner of a Pacific island surfboard shop thinking in March about the cost of buying 100 surfboards from his California supplier in July should care about his country's exchange rate...

Africa' burgeoning ties with China: maximizing the benefits of China's increasing economic engagement with Africa.
March 1, 2008... AFRICA and China have been trading partners for centuries. But in recent years, the level and intensity of their relationship have increased dramatically. In the early 1990s, official development aid and government ministries dominated the...

Jobs on another shore: outsourcing of service jobs to other countries could effect industrial countries' economies and attitudes toward globalization.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CHINA and, more recently, India are emerging as major trading countries at the same time that a new form of international commerce is taking shape--technologically assisted offshoring of jobs, especially of jobs once...

Lessons from history.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Barry Eichengreen Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006, 200 pp., $26 (16.95 [pounds sterling]) (cloth). For almost a decade, a major concern about the...

Longer view is better.(Russia's Capitalist Revolution Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed)(Book review)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Anders Aslund Russia's Capitalist Revolution Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C., 2007, 356 pp., $26.95 (paper). The transformation of...

Inside risks: when financial turmoil has major effects, credit derivatives provide useful early warnings for the macroeconomy.(STRAIGHT TALK)
March 1, 2008... IT has become conventional wisdom that many of the financial sector problems of the past year had their origins in the "mispricing" of risk. There is, no doubt, an element of truth to this view, particularly during the boom years because key...

South Africa.(COUNTRY FOCUS)(Country overview)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... South Africa is seeing its longest expansion, thanks in part to sound policies. But inflation has risen, power supply constrains growth, a widening current account deficit raises vulnerability, and unemployment remains high. Strong...