The migration of highly skilled workers can pay dividends for immigrants and their employers, but it produces losers as well.
Brain Drain and the Politics of Immigration
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development
Brazil’s World Cup Evictions: An Insult to Soccer
Forced evictions are happening throughout Brazil in advance of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, exacerbating the country’s growing inequality.
South Sudan: Colonialism’s Dead Hand
A studied refusal to pay attention to South Sudan’s colonial history helped ignite the current crisis.
Haiti: Billions in Aid, Pennies in Progress Since Earthquake
Four years since its devastating earthquake, progress in Haiti is slow and reconstruction efforts are lacking at best.
Standing Up in Turkey
I arrived in Istanbul last September just as protests were flaring up throughout Turkey. An activist had died at a protest in a southern city, one of several victims of the confrontations with riot police over the last year. By the time I got to Taksim Square in the...
Why Africa Is Turning to China
Many African governments prefer China as an economic partner over Western countries for a number of reasons. First, China’s own development experience has instructive value. Second, China fulfills Africa’s need for critical infrastructure more cheaply, less bureaucratically, and more quickly. And finally, China portrays Africa more positively as a partner in “mutually beneficial cooperation” and “common prosperity,” rather than a “doomed continent” requiring aid.
Shaking Up the World Bank?
Lant Pritchett—a professor of the practice of international development at the Harvard Kennedy School—has been leading a campaign against the election of Jim Kim to the World Bank presidency. Although he isn’t the only critic of Kim’s nomination, he is among the most vocal and prominent. Many of his criticisms have been amplified and echoed by other leading development economists like William Easterly at New York University and several people associated with the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.
The State of Somali Union
Since the fall of the unitary state in 1991 and the subsequent two decades of lawlessness, local Somali communities have been gradually drifting away from one another into more exclusive clans protected by regional authorities. With the absence of a functioning national government to restore public confidence and provide basic governmental services, most Somalis below the age of 30 today generally identify with regional and clan-based entities that are antithetical to the existence of a central government.
How to Occupy the World
The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.” This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world. On October 15, Occupy Wall Street’s success inspired a broad wave of coordinated occupations across Europe.
But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe.
Can the West “Export” Gay Rights?
During the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOG) meeting in Perth, Australia in late October, UK Prime Minister David Cameron warned a number of African leaders that if their respective countries ban homosexuality, they could risk losing UK aid money.
He may not have anticipated the swiftness and fury of the African response to his statement.