A new report highlighted by The Economist, reports that 3 out of 10 new workers in the next decade will be in India. That’s right, India. Not China. By 2020, India will add 110M new workers. A few stats on India’s worker landscape: Expect that about 1/3 of those people will work in the services… Continue reading India — the world’s big new workforce
The Economist recently reported some interesting observations about why Latin America has fallen so far behind the economic growth in East Asia. One word — Worker Productivity The chart on the right shows that in the past 30 years relative to the USA, workers in East Asia have increased their productivity faster and workers in… Continue reading Worker productivity really does matter everywhere
Kaushik Basu of Cornell University and author of Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics, researched and found that governments rarely listen to economic advisors unless they are telling them what they want to hear. Basu recently became the chief economic advisor to India’s finance ministry and so… Continue reading A better way of tracking economic growth?
This past week, the Wall Street Journal published an article called Weaving Africa’s Breadbasket which discussed the announcement by the Gates Foundation and the Howard Buffett Foundation that they will be subsidizing trials in 13 African and 4 Central American countries to help small farmers become suppliers to UN’s World Food Program (WFP). To date,… Continue reading Connecting small farms to global supply chain
A couple of weeks back at the International Forum on Remittances, pills a study was released which reported that global foreign remittances in 2006 totaled three times all aid provided by donor nations to developing countries (as reported by OECD). Global remittances totaled more than $300B while donor aid was $104B. Remittances even topped foreign… Continue reading Remittances top foreign aid
The Economist recently wrote about (article: With reservations) the current debate within India about whether the existing affirmative action (called “reservations” in India) quota legislation for the poor should be extended from higher-education education and government jobs to private companies. First, there are a variety of viewpoints of who should get affirmative action benefits. Historically,… Continue reading Affirmative action for the poor
In my quest for facts about poverty … here is very edutaining video by Hans Rosling demonstrating how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, doctor allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind… Continue reading The seemingly impossible is possible
I continue to be very interested in better understanding whether the globalization movement is having a net positive or negative impact on our economically disadvantaged brothers and sisters. I have a growing reading list on poverty-related literature from a wide variety of viewpoints. Bhagwati in In Defense of Globalization (read my review) argues for the… Continue reading Globalization — Good or Bad?
Good article in Fortune magazine titled: India, generic The Superpower? Think Again by Cait Murphy. She points out that India has done a marvelous job in building a revenue (and tax) generating IT sector employing 1 million people, drugs but it has only 7 million employed in the formal manufacturing sector vs. 100 million people… Continue reading India, the superpower?
Tim Harford wrote an OpEd in today’s New York Times about the myriad of “self-imposed” export bureaucracy that most developing nations still have in place. The context and timing is related to this week’s Hong Kong WTO meetings where the rich nations are unwilling to move forward in reducing agricultural sudsidies which hurt exports of… Continue reading Bureaucracy stifles developing nations exports
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