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
Researchers at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford have created a new way of measuring poverty which takes into account more factors than income. Called the “Multidimensional Poverty Index”, it includes factors such as: Does a family have a dirt or dung floor? Do they have a decent toilet/latrine?… Continue reading A better measure of global poverty?
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?
The Economist published an article called, A partial marvel, last month which summarizes the results of various research which evaluates the value of microcredit in helping the poor. The Net: Not everything (as expected) is rosy. Here are a few highlights: Funds still subsidized. 53% of the $11.7B committed to microfinance industry came at rates… Continue reading Microcredit helps the entrepreneurial poor
One of the largest market failures has been the lack of reasonable housing options for the developing world urban poor. But this may soon be changing. If you’ve been to a developing nation city in the past 20 years, you have likely observed the historically huge migration of people from rural to urban. This is… Continue reading Urban housing for the world’s poor
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