Showing posts from category development.
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Poor Aid, Trade Policies Can Undermine Security, Say Authors of New Volume
›January 22, 2007 // By Wilson Center StaffTrade, Aid and Security: An Agenda for Peace and Development, a new edited volume arriving in bookstores next week, looks at the ways in which conflict and state failure can arise from inappropriate or misused aid and trade policies, particularly when natural resources are at stake. Richard Auty and Philippe Le Billon contribute a chapter on managing revenues from natural resources, and Ian Smillie discusses the relationship between aid and conflict.
Forward and introduction available from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. -
Sachs: Poverty Alleviation Route to Security
›January 19, 2007 // By Wilson Center StaffUrging a better understanding of the roots of instability, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs on Wednesday said that fighting poverty will provide security benefits to the developing and the developed worlds:“Instability will grow where poverty festers in an extreme form, that’s what we’re seeing in the Horn of Africa. This isn’t a crisis about Islam, this isn’t a crisis about geopolitics, this is essentially a crisis of extreme poverty.”
He cited mosquito nets, medicine, and fertilizer as three means to improve health and livelihoods among the world’s poor. -
Measuring the Global Glass Ceiling
›January 11, 2007 // By Wilson Center StaffA World Economic Forum report ranks 115 countries—together comprising 90 percent of the world’s population—by their relative gender gaps. Countries were ranked by the relative inequality between men and women in economics, education, political status, and health and survival. According to London Business School Dean Laura Tyson, who helped shape the report’s methodology, the rankings reveal a lost economic opportunity:“Countries that do not fully capitalize effectively on one-half of their human resources run the risk of undermining their competitive potential. We hope to highlight the economic incentive behind empowering women in addition to promoting equality as a basic human right.”
Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland have the smallest gender gaps. The Philippines, at six, is the only Asian country in the top 10. The United States comes in at 22.