Search

The article discusses the impact of misfiring environmentalism in the context of climate change and its potential harm to the world's poor particularly in developing countries. Topics include the challenges of funding green development projects, the impact of global warming on vulnerable communities and the trade-offs between economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The article focuses on the financial services offered to the poor of developing countries. Financial services for poor people in developing countries--a business known as "microfinance"--have mostly been awful or absent. The poor have been hurt by massive market and regulatory failure. In recent years, at least in some parts of the world, this bleak picture has begun to change, first in credit, then in savings and more recently in remittances. A World Bank report by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirguc-Kunt and Soledad Martinez shows a correlation between lack of financial access and low incomes. A World Bank report by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirguc-Kunt and Soledad Martinez published last month shows a strong correlation between lack of financial access and low incomes. The poor attach great value to having a safe place to keep money and some means of providing for life's risks, either through savings or, better still, through insurance.

The article discusses international economic assistance to development countries, including the politically corrupt Malawi government's stealing aid money. An overview of the percentage of international economic aid that reaches poor people in developing countries is provided.

The article focuses on efforts to reduce micronutrient deficiencies in poor people. It states that the nutrients iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A are chronically in short supply and that as food prices rise, poor people switch from more expensive nutrient-rich foods to cheaper, nutrient-poor staples. It mentions that studies found increases in the gross domestic product had a greater effect on reducing malnutrition than agricultural growth.

The article reports on how mobile-phone firms have found a profitable way to help the poor help themselves. Mobile phones have become indispensable in the rich world. But they are even more useful in the developing world, where the availability of other forms of communication--roads, postal systems or fixed-line phones--is often limited. But despite rapid subscriber growth in much of the developing world, only a small proportion of people--around five percent in both India and sub-Saharan Africa--have their own mobile phones. Several operators from developing countries have teamed up under the auspices of the GSM Association, which promotes the use of GSM, the world's dominant mobile-phone standard. They invited the handset-makers to bid for a contract to supply up to six million handsets for less than $40 each. The contract was won by Motorola. Delivery of handsets began in April. This week the procurement process began for more handsets, to be delivered from next January. As well as letting smaller operators pool their bargaining power, this scheme aims to draw manufacturers' attention to the needs of developing countries. The GSMA is now making a 50-country study that will, it hopes, provide conclusive proof of the benefits of cutting taxes on mobile phones.

The article focuses on U.S. President George W. Bush's foreign aid program known as the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). George W. Bush's flagship foreign-aid programme is under fire. Since 2002, when the president promised to set it up, the Millennium Challenge Corporation has found only four relatively small poor countries to give money to. Last week, the MCC's chief executive, Paul Applegarth, announced that he was quitting. The MCC is unloved by both left and right. A Republican-led House of Representatives sub-committee has just recommended nearly halving its budget, to $1.75 billion next year. American liberals suspect it is part of Bush's conspiracy to conservatise the world. And Europeans mock the MCC as slower, meaner and more ideological than their own aid programmes.

Explores the way technological advances have helped people in undeveloped nations. Increased life spans in Angola; Reduced infant mortality rate as a result of immunizations; Other ways that technological innovation in rich countries has benefited poor countries.

Discusses the idea of microcredit lending, which are small loans given to poor people to set up or expand business. Details of African communities, which use microcredit organizations; Local problems of microfinance, including diseases in Africa; How organizations have encouraged poor borrowers to form groups to cross-guarantee each other's loans; Success of microcredit.

The article argues that the United Nations' proposed list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set out how to improve the lives of the poor people in emerging countries, needs to be shortened and redesigned to focus on reducing poverty, improving health, and boosting education. According to the article, the SDGs are the successors to the development targets that various governments agreed to in 2000. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and good intentions are examined.

The article discusses the potential impact of "commitment-savings accounts" (CSAs) on the economic conditions of poor people in developing nations such as Uganda and Malawi, focusing on a lack of demand for CSAs in Kenya, and information about punitive fees and investments in livestock.

The editorial notes the success of Safaricom company's M-PESA mobile money service in Kenya and comments on the usefulness of mobile money services in developing countries where these services can help the poor save small amounts of money. The author suggests that governments should use and promote mobile money services which allows money transfers through mobile phones.

The article focuses on differences in fertility rates between poor and rich people in developing countries. It states that a study by Harvard University found that from 1992 to 2012, the fertility rates of poor people dropped more slowly than wealthy and mentions a study in 2008 of African nations found differences in fertility by education group rises. It mentions that as per person gross domestic product in developing countries increased, rich lead the decline in fertility.

The article focuses on the effects of mobile money and cellular telephones on poor people in developing countries. The article reports that mobile phones have a direct impact on economic growth in poor countries and that mobile-money services such as M-PESA can be used on mobile phones. The article suggests that mobile money is a safer and faster way to transfer money in Africa and Asia.

The article observes that, three years on, the G8's nuclear clean-up is still falling short. Alarmed by what groups like al-Qaeda might try next, G8 leaders used their first annual summit after the September 11th terrorist attacks on America to put more money and determination into a long-running American-led effort to dismantle weapons and secure poorly protected nuclear, chemical and biological materials in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Collectively, they pledged $20 billion over ten years. When the G8 summiteers next meet in July, the promised fund will be about three billion dollars short of its target. Money isn't the only problem. There is plenty more to be done, including recovering poorly-guarded nuclear materials from research reactors around the world. The shortfall in pledges is symptomatic of other difficulties that have beset the clean-up effort. The stakes could not be higher. G8 leaders need to focus on ways to speed the nuclear clean-up. For among those likely to suffer from the fallout if a new terrorist-inspired catastrophe rocks the rich world's economies are precisely the poorer countries, in Africa as elsewhere, that this year's summiteers are keenest to help.

The article questions why poor democracies are not better at ending poverty. India, unlike China, is a vibrant democracy with a proudly robust habit of turfing lousy governments out of office. Yet, in poverty reduction, at least, China's unelected leaders have done better. A book by Bimal Jalan, a leading Indian economist and former governor of the central bank, lists some of the woes afflicting Indian politics, such as the rise of small parties, the dwindling of inner-party democracy and the shrinking role of Parliament in ensuring accountability. In poverty-reduction, as in growth, India is typical of other developing-country democracies, having achieved steady but not spectacular success. The relationship between caste and class helps explain the wide regional discrepancies in India.

The article comments on the views of Jeffrey Sachs, head of the United Nations "Millennium Project". Mr Sachs admits that foreign aid has not achieved much in the past. Development aid has failed to stimulate much development. Lavishly aided countries have grown no faster than those that have been neglected. This is one reason why rich countries refuse to give much. Though most have promised to donate 0.7% of gross national income, the average for the richest 22 countries is 0.25%. David Dollar and Lant Pritchett, among others, have dug up solid evidence that aid, when directed towards poor countries with sound economic policies and competent institutions, tends to accelerate growth and lift people out of poverty. In a study published earlier this year, Mr Sachs looks at tropical sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty seems most intractable, and challenges the popular idea that this is mostly down to poor governance. He cites other obstacles to Africa's growth, such as its extraordinary disease burden, the lack of deep ports and navigable rivers, the infertility of much of its soil and the colonial legacy of borders that slice the continent into lots of tiny nations with negligible markets and too little sense of nationhood to remain stable. Mr Sachs envisages funnelling most of the money through national governments, who would have to train many more teachers, engineers, nurses and other professionals, and then persuade the best of them not to emigrate to rich countries. Mr Sachs's grand plan depends on there being plenty of governments in poor countries that are clean and competent enough to be entrusted with a sudden infusion of free money.

THIS year's report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the state of humanity's health concentrates on the" 3 by 5" anti-AIDS initiative that the agency, and several collaborators, announced last year. That might not sound much, given that at least 34 million people are now thought to be infected with HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, it would, in fact, be a huge leap forward. The plan is to create easy but efficient ways of delivering life-saving treatment. Obviously, pills would have to be provided in larger numbers. But drug regimens would also be simplified. Care and counselling would be delegated from doctors and nurses to paramedical" community health workers", to avoid wasting scarce skilled manpower. And there would, inevitably, be "mobilisation" of poor-country governments, charities, religious bodies, companies and United Nations agencies. Richard Feachem, the head of the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, another of the international bodies involved in combating the infection, reckons that " 3 by 5" on its own will cost $2 billion-3 billion a year.

HUNDREDS of millions of poor people around the world lack access to two services that people in rich countries take entirely for granted: clean water and basic sanitation. According to a study by Frank Rijsberman, director-general of the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka, improving the delivery of clean water and sanitation to the poor would be a highly cost-effective way to use additional aid to developing countries. His paper," The Water Challenge", was commissioned as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project.. The global" water crisis" that development economists and environmentalists often refer to is really two distinct problems, says Mr Rijsberman. It has been estimated that at any given time, close to half the population in the developing world are suffering from one or more diseases associated with inadequate provision of water and sanitation services: diarrhoea, ascariasis, dracunculiasis (guinea worm), hookworm, schistosomiasis (snail fever) and trachoma. The United Nations' Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation is to halve the numbers lacking access to basic supplies by 2015.

A new report gives governments some facts to ponder about economic development. For a better understanding of the plight of the world's poor, the protestors against capitalism who descended on the World Trade Organisation's meeting in Cancún last month ought perhaps to have gone to Haiti instead. In Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, prospective business people have to wait an average of 203 days for permission to start trading. Then they have to pay registration costs and satisfy minimum capital requirements of around four times the average Haitian's annual income. The juxtaposition of stifling bureaucracy and abject poverty is no coincidence, argues a new report, "Doing Business in 2004", by the World Bank. It offers one of the first consistent, rigorous portraits of the costs of business regulations in poor countries. These often concern macroeconomic questions such as monetary policy and fiscal discipline, and the means of globalisation, such as free trade and foreign investment. Countries such as Haiti which, through colonialism, inherited laws from the French legal system are especially prone to red tape.

Judged by their rhetoric, rich countries are falling over themselves to help the world's poorest. The current multilateral round of trade negotiations is called the Doha Development Round, because it is meant specifically to help poor countries. France's to-do list includes a moratorium on subsidies on exports to Africa, trade concessions and new efforts to stabilise commodity prices. George Bush, who in 2002 proposed a 50% increase in America's aid budget over three years, this year offered to triple spending to combat AIDS in Africa. Promises aside, which rich countries actually have policies that help the poor? The traditional gauge of a country's commitment to development is foreign aid. Total aid flows rose in 2002, by 4.8% after inflation. America is the biggest donor in absolute terms, but the stingiest relative to the size of its economy, spending only 0.12% of its GDP. A new index drawn up by the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think-tank, with Foreign Policy magazine, attempts to rank 21 rich countries by averaging their scores in six development-related policies: aid, trade, the environment, migration, investment and peacekeeping. America scores well on trade but badly on everything else, and so is ranked second-bottom, above only Japan.

Comments on the absurdity of the rituals of cargo cultism, in which the world's poor pray for the materialist gods of the rich white nations to bring them alms. Argument that the alternative to supporting cargo-cultism is to allow free movement of people; Examples of cargo cultism; Rejection by most wealthy countries of economic migrants.

Reports that the world's financial leaders have gathered in Madrid, Spain for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to debate about the world's poor continues. Mandate of the World Bank is to alleviate poverty in poor countries; Intention of the IMF to help countries out of financial difficulties; Study conducted by Elliot Berg, an American development economist, which suggests that life for the world's poor may not have deteriorated during the 1980s; Study on Latin America conducted by Oxfam, a British charity, which suggests that after a decade of structural adjustment, and despite economic growth, more people than ever are living in poverty.