development Archives - Page 5 of 18 - Foreign Policy In Focus

Burma’s Big Brother

by Dan Beaker | Dec 2, 2011

Over 70 percent of Burma’s FDI has come from China, largely for development projects in ethnic-minority regions. These projects, along with smaller initiatives worth millions if not billions of dollars more in undocumented investment, have now brought tensions in ethnic regions to a boiling point. In turn, such tensions have led to the breakdown of a handful of ceasefire agreements between ethnic armed groups and the government army, which, incidentally, receives the majority of its weaponry from China.

America vs China in Africa

by Francis Njubi Nesbitt | Dec 1, 2011

China’s imminent replacement of the West as the dominant international economic and political force in Africa epitomizes the most dramatic shift in geopolitics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet the United States and Europe, Africa’s traditional trading partners, seem incapable of responding to the challenge and retaking the initiative. Instead, their response has been to wring their hands in despair and make ineffectual noises about human rights and democracy.

Foreign Policy Goes Gaga

by John Feffer | Jul 12, 2011

Lady Gaga and Alice Walker don’t have much in common. One dresses in red meat; the other doesn’t even eat the stuff. One writes lyrics like “I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it’s free.” The other writes The Color Purple. But they are both cultural celebrities, and the media gravitates to them for comments. And they both have used this celebrity status to weigh in on global issues.

Rethinking Sweatshop Economics

by Jason Hickel | Jul 1, 2011

The news that a Romanian sweatshop manufactured one of Kate Middleton’s most famous dresses has inspired renewed popular interest in the ethics and economics of outsourcing jobs to utilize super-cheap labor. This is only the most recent of a string of cases that exemplify the shocking proliferation of sweatshops — even across Europe — over the past few decades. But the truly troubling part of the story is the logic that Kate’s defenders have invoked to justify this trend, drawing on arguments made by allegedly “progressive” U.S. economists.

Development and Migration: The Missing Link

by Laura Carlsen | Jun 30, 2011

Although Obama’s attempt to reframe the debate moved discussion back into economics, he left out any structural explanation of what pushes migration in a globalized world. He portrayed U.S. companies that employ undocumented labor as rogue rule-breakers, and simultaneously exalted migrants as valuable assets while still describing them as global interlopers.

Interview with William Easterly

by Jessica Mack | May 5, 2011

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University. He is Co-Director of the Development Research Institute and editor of the Aid Watch blog. He is author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. This is an abridged version of an interview I conducted in NYC on 3 May 2011.

Haiti’s Reconstruction: Who Benefits?

by Daniel Moss | Apr 27, 2011

Georges Marie is a proud and angry Haitian lawyer who lost her husband in the earthquake. As she mourned, the humanitarian industry exploded. She watched with concern as Port au Prince’s narrow streets became clogged with white Land Rovers, each stamped with an aid agency logo on the driver’s door. It still rankles her when the humanitarians dine and dance in a four-star restaurant overlooking the Place Boyer, a public square now strung with tarps, home to some of the million-plus people still displaced from the 2010 earthquake.

Development Aid: Enemy of Emancipation

by Firoze Manji | Feb 24, 2011

Kenyan scholar Firoze Manji gives his thoughts on the ‘aid industry’, an industry which hampers Africans’ recovery of their continent, made rotten with corruption and the pillaging of natural resources.

Global Solidarity Levy Urgently Needed

by William Minter | Sep 16, 2010

When world leaders gather for the Summit on Millennium Development Goals on September 20, the reports and the speeches will be largely predictable. True, there has been some progress made against global poverty. But particularly in Africa, the international community will likely fall far short of meeting the goals by the target year 2015. And even if the goal of reducing the poverty rate by half is achieved, about one billion people will still be living on less than $1.25 a day.

Starving Africa’s Future?

by Beth Tuckey | Aug 11, 2010

In what may be President Obama’s most significant foray into changing U.S.-Africa policy since his election in 2008, the United States is embarking on a new initiative to boost agricultural production in the global south. Feed the Future (FTF) came out of the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2009 where developed country leaders committed to acting to “achieve sustainable global food security.” Obama pledged $3.5 billion over three years toward this goal, in hopes that other rich nations would also make significant investments in agricultural development.