The US may be the economic superpower, and China the new manufacturing powerhouse, but there is one industry in which Africa still leads the world: the manufacture of red tape. The World Bank releases its 2008
Doing Business report (
overview, pdf) on the ease of, well, doing business. The USA is pushed into third by plucky New Zealand and Singapore but overall Eastern Europe has overtaken East Asia as the most business-friendly environment behind high-income OECD countries.
[more inside]
posted by patricio
on Oct 22, 2007 -
34 comments
"The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther." A thorough summary in The Nation of the brilliant but ignored
Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by
Ralph Gomory, former IBM Senior Vice President for Science and winner of the National Medal of Science. His heresy? Arguing, with supporting technical and economic data, that multinational corporations and their home countries have divergent interests in shipping skilled labor and advanced technologies overseas, and that this "divergence" is a net negative for the American economy and the American public. Globalization, he argues, has its losers, the United States paramount among them.
posted by Pastabagel
on Apr 20, 2007 -
76 comments
The Trade Surplus and the Olive Tree The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has seen its loan portfolio drop 73 per cent since 2003. Nobody seems to be defaulting on their loans lately, and there hasn't been a
big bailout since 2001.
The IMF's summit this week in Singapore will look at this issue and how to better the world
balance of trade betweed the developing world and the industrial economies of the west. But is there really a
place (warning: PDF) for the IMF in the trade agreements between
China and the
US?
posted by parmanparman
on Sep 15, 2006 -
7 comments
Death of a Movement (?) from National Review: Some relevant criticisms of the anti-corporate-globalists mixed in with the prerequisite charges of anti-Americanism.
posted by Ty Webb
on Apr 22, 2002 -
2 comments
Science and technology in the developing world. SciDev.net went online last month, with the backing of the UK Department for International Development. Its main goal "is to enhance the ability of all its users to engage in informed debate on ways of applying science and technology to social and economic development in an environmentally responsible way." Hopefully, a useful tool for globalisation discussions.
posted by liam
on Feb 1, 2002 -
3 comments
